Congratulations to Mattia Scotto, who today successfully defended his MSc thesis, by the title of “Dark Energy models featuring negative energy densities: growth of structure and novel perturbation-level signatures” (with the opponent being Prof. Albino Perego)! Mattia’s defense was outstanding, and he received top grades and honours, i.e. 110 e Lode (making me a very proud advisor, with this being the third 100 e Lode in a row for my amazing MSc students, after Davide Pedrotti and Giovanni Piccoli). In his thesis which I supervised, Mattia studied dark energy models featuring negative energy density components, including a negative cosmological constant with an evolving component with positive energy density on top, and a sign-switching cosmological constant. He studied in detail the growth of structure, late ISW effect, and signatures in the cross-correlation between CMB temperature anisotropies and galaxy clustering, finding however that current data has too low signal-to-noise for one to search for these signatures. During the same day, I also served as opponent for Arianna Balduzzi, an outstanding MSc student of Prof. Max Rinaldi who defended her thesis studying reheating and preheating in scale-invariant inflation.
Mattia Scotto joins my group!
My group keeps expanding, and now includes Mattia Scotto as well! He will be working on his Master’s thesis under my supervision, where we plan on studying various cosmological signatures of dark energy models featuring a negative cosmological constant (perfect timing given today’s new preprint!), and how the signatures we will find can help us distinguish these models from the cosmological constant of ΛCDM. Welcome Mattia, and I’m looking forward to our work together!