Today is officially my first day as Assistant Professor at the University of Trento! In practice I’ll actually be physically starting in a month or so, during which I will be on leave of absence to take care of a number of scattered things (mostly bureaucracy related to the move). In the meantime, below is the view I will get from my new office - nothing short of breathtaking, right? 😎
Primordial graviton background paper accepted in ApJ Letters!
My latest paper with Avi Loeb has just been accepted for publication in ApJ Letters! I can confidently say that is at the same time one of the simplest yet most exciting papers I have ever written (Avi is really good at coming up with simple yet profound ideas, and I won’t lie, the idea behind this paper is entirely his). The short idea is that one can (with some caveats) rule out the whole inflationary paradigm, without reference to any specific model, by finding a background of relic gravitons with certain specific properties, the reason being that inflation should have washed it out: we show that this will be extremely challenging, but not impossible (I will likely have retired by the time it will even be possible). You can find the preprint version of the paper, which is also the first one I have written with my new Trento affiliation, on arXiv: 2208.14088.
Moving (back) to the University of Trento!
I’m extremely happy to announce that I’m moving back to the University of Trento, where I will soon start a new position as tenure-track Assistant Professor (RTDb in the Italian system)! I’m very excited not only about returning to my home country, Italy, but specifically to the University of Trento, which is where I got my Bachelor’s degree back in 2012. Those who know me know that this was by far my dream job: returning to my alma mater, where my journey in physics began, really feels like the closing of a huge circle, not to mention that Trento itself is a fantastic place to live in. Incidentally, the official offer arrived precisely on my last day as a Newton-Kavli Fellow at the University of Cambridge - which I started exactly on October 7, 2019 - which, besides the perfect timing, confirms the non-written rule that virtually all Cambridge Kavli Fellowship holders move on to a permanent or tenure-track position immediately afterwards 😉 I really can’t wait to get started!
