It’s a great honor to announce that today I start a new role as Editor of Physics of the Dark Universe, one of the leading journals in cosmology and astroparticle physics. The Editor-in-Chief is Stefano Profumo, and other fellow Editors are Hong-Jian He and Ryan Foley. The journal has undergone a significant editorial reshuffle, with only Stefano left from the previous generation, whereas I basically replace Alessandra Silvestri and Luca Amendola (whom I thank for indicating me as their heir!). Interestingly, the journal has always been very “Italian”, with previous editors besides Alessandra and Luca including Licia Verde, Gianfranco Bertone, and Filippo Vernizzi, but I will actually be the first Italy-based Italian editor. Looking forward to this new adventure!
CosmoVerse
As of today I am officially a member of the CosmoVerse COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action, an European network of like-minded people with a particular interest in cosmological tensions, aiming at fostering interdisciplinary research. The Action is chaired by Jackson Levi Said at the University of Malta, whereas the Vice Chair is my friend and colleague Eleonora Di Valentino. I look forward to many interesting discussions, workshops, and seminars that will come out of CosmoVerse!
New (first) group member!
Today Davide Pedrotti joins my group as a new Master’s student. Davide is enrolled in the Trento-Tübingen Double Degree, and will be jointly supervised by me in Trento, and by Prof. Kostas Kokkotas in Tübingen. While the finer details remain to be defined, Davide’s thesis will be on the topic of quasi-normal modes of black holes beyond GR, their use in testing gravity, and potentially their connection to black hole shadows. Welcome Davide, and looking forward to our work together!
More media coverage for primordial graviton background paper
Over the past few weeks our primordial graviton background paper has been receiving a tremendous amount of media attention (in no small part due to the excellent joint Cambridge-Harvard press release and to its being picked up by Phys.org), particularly in the Italian and Spanish-speaking media. Particularly noteworthy is the coverage from Media INAF:
www.media.inaf.it/2022/11/04/vagnozzi-inflazione/
Remarkably, a few local Trentino Alto-Adige newspapers also picked up on this (first time for me appearing in a newspaper from Trentino):
www.lavocedeltrentino.it/2022/11/16/dubbi-sulla-nascita-del-cosmo-nel-team-anche-un-ricercatore-delluniversita-di-trento/ (La Voce del Trentino)
www.ildolomiti.it/ricerca-e-universita/2022/fondo-di-gravitoni-lo-studio-di-vagnozzi-unitn-e-del-collega-loeb-apre-una-nuova-porta-per-falsificare-il-paradigma-piu-accreditato-sulla-formazione-delluniverso (Il Dolomiti)
I particularly enjoyed the interview with Sara De Pascale from il Dolomiti, whose piece (in Italian of course) I highly recommend!
Regretfully, a number of other pieces were scientifically incorrect or misleading at best, suggesting that Avi and I claim that inflation is ruled out and should be replaced by a Big Bounce - let me clearly state once and for all that we said no such thing and made no judgement call on the status of inflation (in fact, in the second paragraph of the paper we explicitly write “Here we do not seek to take sides in the debate”…), so these issues simply amount to bad or click-bait journalism.
Press release for primordial graviton background paper
Following the publication of our primordial graviton background paper in ApJ Letters, both the University of Cambridge and Harvard University have issued a joint press release which beautifully summarizes our results, and which you can find at the following links:
www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/can-cosmic-inflation-be-ruled-out
www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/can-cosmic-inflation-be-ruled-out
Enjoy the read!
Primordial graviton background paper published in ApJ Letters!
My paper with Avi Loeb on the primordial graviton background, which I previously reported on in an earlier news item, has now officially been published in ApJ Letters! The full bibliographic coordinates for the paper are Astrophys. J. Lett. 939 (2022) L22. Here is the link to the paper (which is published Open Access).
ERC Starting Grant application submitted!
Right on the deadline, I submitted my ERC Starting Grant application. Obviously I chose Trento as host and, albeit much less obviously, “TRENTO” as acronym.* It was a huge amount of work and, I won’t lie, I know the chances of even just making it to the interview stage are meager to say the least. However, I have decided that I will openly report the outcome of the evaluation here in this news section, for a simple reason: in academia there is a tendency to only discuss one’s successes, whereas openly talking about one’s insuccesses is considered somewhat of a “taboo”. I hope that by openly discussing a (likely) failure/insuccess, I will help normalizing this type of discussions which, while often done in oral form, are rarely done in written form - I believe this can only make for a healthier community (I’ll note I have been prompted also by Natalie Hogg’s excellent blog, which I regularly read and highly recommend, and which does not shy away from openly discussing lack of success). So, regardless of the outcome, I will get back with an update on this in March, while in the meantime enjoying a deserved break!
*Just because it already worked once: my successful Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship application, which would have been hosted by the University of Padova had I not declined it, indeed had “PADOVA” as acronym.
First day (of school)
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!
