After receiving the Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale (National Scientific Habilitation) as Full Professor in Astrophysics in October, I’ve now officially received it, again as Full Professor, in the competition sector 02/A2 - Theoretical Physics of Fundamental Interactions! This is actually the sector within which I was hired, and therefore this Abilitazione is of more direct relevance to me than the 02/C1 one. The list of candidates who received the Abilitazione in the 02/A2 sector in the same round as me can be found here.
Teaching ends today (for now)
My teaching duties for the autumn semester end today, with the final lecture for the cosmology course focused on deriving the angular power spectrum of CMB temperature anisotropies (a lecture I always particularly enjoy, even though students seem to find it particularly difficult). Unlike the previous semester, this one was much lighter, as I only taught my cosmology course. It was once more very rewarding to interact with a bunch of bright students, whom I really hope enjoyed the course, and whose feedback I look forward to. While the next two months will be devoted to exams (teaching restarts at the end of February), I’ll be able to focus almost entirely on research, with the goal of wrapping up a few papers which are nearly done but just need a final push. So, once more, stay tuned for some interesting work which hopefully will appear in the coming months!
Teaching committee
I’m extremely pleased to have been nominated member of the new Teaching Committee (Commissione Didattica) - “new” given that we just elected the new Head of Department, and this implies a reshuffling/re-election of all committees, councils, and boards. The other members of the committee will be Albino Perego (teaching coordinator and chair of the committee), Stefano Azzini, Roberto Iuppa, Matteo Leonardi, and Marco Zanatta. Our tasks will include taking care of all things teaching-related, and in particular I will be responsible for the theoretical courses at both BSc and MSc levels. It will undoubtedly involve a lot of work, but I am very happy to put myself on the line to help improve our teaching activities, for which we are among the best Italian Universities. I look forward to working with my fellow committee members over the next years!
Tonale Winter School
This week I’m travelling to Passo del Tonale to lecture at the 2023 Tonale Winter School on Cosmology. The weather is fortunately fantastic, with clear skies and a lot of snow (below is the view from my hotel window)! For those of you who might be interested, below are the slides I will use during the lectures, and the questions which will be discussed in the working group sessions:
Lecture 1: Basics of theoretical and observational cosmology [Slides]
Lecture 2: Measuring the Hubble constant – the Hubble tension [Slides]
Lecture 3: How (not) to solve the Hubble tension? [Slides]
Lecture 4: Other tensions and challenges for ΛCDM [Slides]
I have really fond memories from the time I attended as a student in 2014 (fun fact: my roommate was Vivian Poulin, now one of the big names in the Hubble tension game), and I’m looking forward to an exciting week!
Official openings for 2 DARKTRACK-funded postdoc positions
I am officially hiring! Applications are now welcome for 2 DARKTRACK-funded postdoc positions, for which I was previously gathering expressions of interest. Two positions are available, depending on whether or not the candidate holds a PhD at the time of the application:
* call 185/2023: lavoraconnoi.unitn.it/en/research-contracts/department-physics-call-selections-awarding-no-1-research-fellowship-decree-no-185-2023 (for candidates already holding a PhD)
* call 186/2023: lavoraconnoi.unitn.it/en/research-contracts/department-physics-call-selections-awarding-no-1-research-fellowship-decree-no-186-2023 (for candidates yet to obtain their PhD)
Please have a look at the INSPIRE job ad for further details, but make sure you submit all your application material to the above links, as we cannot consider material received via other channels. Please reach out to me if you have further questions about the project or the positions!
Universe Today interview
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to be interviewed by Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today, for his well-known Universe Today Podcast YouTube channel. We mostly talked about my seven hints paper (at a level I would say accessible to those within the general public who are interested in cosmology and keep up at a popular science level with what is going on in the field), as well as a few other things including my current research obsessions (spoiler: it has to do with dark energy). The video interview is now available on YouTube, and you can find it here, or if you prefer you can listen to it on Spotify. In the frame below, I was clearly very amused by something Fraser had just said, whereas he was equally surprised by what I had just said 😄 It was really great fun chatting with Fraser, and I hope you enjoy the interview!
Media coverage for Laniakea paper
Our Laniakea paper has been picked up by Universe Today, who write a nice piece which you can find here:
www.universetoday.com/164198/if-you-account-for-the-laniakea-supercluster-the-hubble-tension-might-be-even-larger/
The same piece was later picked up by Phys.org, and our results were mentioned in passing in the Spanish newspaper El Confidencial (as well as a number of other news outlets). Enjoy the read!
Visit to Ferrara
Yesterday and today I enjoyed visiting the INFN Ferrara division, where I gave a talk on “Searching for dark energy off the beaten track” (slides here). I really enjoyed these two days, especially since I got to catch up with three long-term collaborators but especially friends of mine: Martina Gerbino (who was the postdoc following my day-to-day work during my PhD, and without whose help I certainly wouldn’t be in my position today!), Massimiliano (Massi) Lattanzi, and Thejs Brinckmann. The Ferrara cosmology group led by Paolo Natoli is really fantastic: young, dynamic, talented, diverse, and with a wide range of interests! If Padova is currently the best place for cosmology in Italy, I have no doubts that Ferrara is definitely one of the top places to look out for in the near future (but let’s hope to put Trento on the list soon!), especially in light of Martina’s ERC Starting Grant and the group’s commendable strategy of investing in very young people. Non-scientific highlights included tasting salama, a delicious local specialty, which I highly recommend trying if you get the chance!
Laniakea and the Hubble tension
Extremely excited about my latest work with Leo Giani, Cullan Howlett, Khaled Said, and Tam Davis (all four from the University of Queensland), where we study the impact of Laniakea, the supercluster hosting the Milky Way (also known as our home in the Cosmos) on local cosmological measurements and in particular measurements of the Hubble constant. Our initial hope was that taking into account the local inhomogeneities and anisotropies induced by Laniakea could help alleviate the Hubble tension - surprisingly, we found the opposite! The reason in short is that Laniakea is on average overdense compared to the cosmological background in which it resides, so its effect is the opposite of the prototype one would need to alleviate the Hubble tension locally (e.g. a void) - in other words, if one accounts for Laniakea’s impact on distances when inferring the Hubble constant locally, one should find an even higher Hubble constant, by an amount which we quantify exactly. Congratulations to Leo, who did basically all the heavy-lifting on this paper (incidentally this is what we were working on when he visited), which I expect can become a very important one! You can read our results in the preprint we just posted on arXiv: 2311.00215.
Davide Pedrotti (re)joins my group!
Today Davide Pedrotti, after an excellent MSc defense, (re)joins my group as a PhD student. We will be starting some very cool work on cosmological tensions, while also carrying on Davide’s earlier research interests in black hole physics. Stay tuned in particular for our upcoming paper on the connection between quasinormal modes and shadows for rotating regular BHs, which constituted a major part of Davide’s MSc thesis! Welcome (back) Davide!
Science Magazine interview
I was recently interviewed by Adrian Cho for Science Magazine on the current status of the Hubble tension and what could solve it, with part of the discussion motivated by my seven hints paper. Adrian’s extremely nice piece appeared today and, besides from myself, contains quotes from a number of well-known scientists, including Adam Riess, Tanvi Karwal, Johannes Eskilt, Ryan Keeley, Marc Kamionkowski, and Samuel Goldstein. You can read the full article here:
www.science.org/content/article/universes-puzzlingly-fast-expansion-may-defy-explanation-cosmologists-fret
I had great fun talking to Adrian, and I hope you enjoy the interview!
Expressions of interest for 2 DARKTRACK-funded postdoc positions
As mentioned earlier I am looking to hire 2 postdocs funded by my DARKTRACK project grant, focused on developing new ways to look for dark energy. There are a few bureaucratic steps I need to navigate before I can officially open the application process for these positions, but in the meantime I welcome expressions of interest from qualified and interested candidates. If you are interested, please send me an expression of interest following the indications provided in the INSPIRE job ad, with material to be sent to this AJO eDelivery link by November 23, 2023. As explained in the job ad, the cover letter is particularly important and will play a key role in my evaluation of the expressions of interest, so do pay particular attention to that. Do not hesitate to get in touch if you have further questions about the project or the positions!
Negative cosmological constant and JWST paper published in JCAP!
My paper with Shahnawaz Adil, Upala Mukhopadhyay, and Anjan Sen, studying a dark energy model featuring a negative cosmological constant in light of the JWST observations, which I previously reported on in an earlier news item, has now officially been published in JCAP! The full bibliographic coordinates for the paper are JCAP 2310 (2023) 072. Here is the link to the paper (which is published Open Access).
Two recent talks and a visit to Padova
I gave two talks on my works recently, a first one at RWTH Aachen (in the local cosmology plus astroparticle journal club, on my seven hints paper), and a second one at the University of Padova (on “Searching for dark energy off the beaten track”, slides here). The seminar in Padova was actually my first in-person seminar in nearly 4 years, after years of Zoom seminars. It was very nice to visit Padova after many years, and interact with what is probably one of the best (and biggest) cosmology groups in Italy. Both talks were followed by lively discussions which left lots of food for thought (and projects).
DARKTRACK project funded!
Really excited to announce that I won the Internal Call for Research 2023 grant for which I applied in August! My project “Searching for Dark Energy off the beaten track” (acronym: DARKTRACK) was one among 5 projects selected throughout the University of Trento from ~150 applications, and I have been granted in total 135.200,00€. The goal of the project will be that of developing new ways to search for (screened) dark energy, and more generally look for non-gravitational interactions of dark energy. I will use the money to hire 2 postdocs for 2 years each (ideally an astroparticle physicist and a BH theorist), so if you are interested in joining my group stay tuned for updates on the application process. The group’s future is looking extremely bright, considering that we will also have another postdoc coming with a Caritro Fellowship, and I can’t wait to start working with all these bright young minds!
Davide Pedrotti's MSc defense
Congratulations to Davide Pedrotti, who today successfully defended his MSc thesis, by the title of “Studies on Quasi-Normal Modes and Shadows of Black Holes” (with the opponent being Prof. Albino Perego)! Davide’s defense was outstanding (one of the committee members, a condensed matter physicist, said: “This is the first talk on black holes I’ve understood in years”), and in fact he received top grades and honours, i.e. 110 e Lode. In his thesis, supervised by myself and Prof. Kostas Kokkotas at the University of Tübingen, Davide studied quasi-normal modes and shadows of a number of well-motivated BH metrics beyond GR, and in particular investigated the non-trivial correspondence between the two for metrics describing rotating regular BHs: part of his thesis will be written up in a paper in the coming months, so stay tuned! During the same day, I also served as opponent for an MSc student of Prof. Bill Weber. Davide will now be enjoying a few days of deserved break before starting hiw new adventure as a PhD student in Trento in November.
Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale as Full Professor in the 02/C1 sector (Astrophysics)
I’ve received the Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale (National Scientific Habilitation) as Full Professor in the competition sector 02/C1 - Astronomy, Astrophysics, Earth and Planetary Physics! The Abilitazione is a requirement to be able to be considered for positions as Associate or Full Professor (depending on the level of the Abilitazione itself), and the procedure to obtain it can be quite time-consumming. The list of candidates who received the Abilitazione in the 02/C1 sector in the same round as me can be found here.
Top 2% scientists (2022 edition)
For what it’s worth, it looks like my name appeared in the list of top 2% scientists worldwide. The list was compiled by John Ioannidis at Stanford University and can be found here. It appears that for the year 2022 I’ve been ranked 6461st across all fields, and 65th in my area, whereas considering my whole career the numbers become 102993rd and 1929th respectively. Kind of cool, although these numbers really don’t mean anything (I’m one of those whose thinks the FIFA ranking doesn’t mean anything, else Belgium would have won a couple of World Cups already, so let alone ranking scientists!) and should really be taken with a lot of salt!
We got the Caritro Fellowship!
We (Max Rinaldi and I) received amazing news during the European Researchers’ Night - our application for the 2023 Caritro Postdoctoral Fellowship was successful, and our project was among the 9 selected in the whole of Trentino, across all fields! We were awarded 70.000€, and I’m super glad to announce that Simony Santos da Costa, currently a postdoc at INFN Pisa and whose application we supported as PIs, will therefore be joining our group in the coming months, for 2 years. The project we developed with Simony is entitled “Inflation and dark sector physics in light of next-generation cosmological surveys”, and consists of two parts: the scientific part is obviously targeting inflation, dark matter, and dark energy (especially in light of cosmological tensions and next-generation CMB and LSS data), whereas a second outreach part envisages a series of public lectures by Simony (who speaks Italian excellently!) at MUSE. One of the aims of the outreach part is of course to get the general public interested in science, but at the same time to raise awareness about the issue of gender (im)balance in physics, and hopefully encourage more young female students who are interested in physics to not be afraid to pursue their interests - in other words, we want Simony to be a role model for young women in physics at least in the Trentino region (let’s start small and see how things go). I’m really delighted at the prospect of having the first postdoc joining my group (though I’ll admit that, having been a postdoc myself until less than an year ago, it does feel somewhat strange), and I look forward to working with Simony, whose work I’ve been following for some time now!
Notte della Ricerca 2023
I had great fun taking part in the Notte della Ricerca (European Researchers’ Night - an Europe-wide public outreach event, meant to explain science and its impact to the public in fun and inspiring ways) at MUSE, the Science Museum of Trento. Together with Max Rinaldi and Chiara Cecchini (Max’s PhD student) we prepared four very simple posters, each related to one of our research themes: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Black Holes, and the CMB. No words, just pictures, the idea being that of getting people curious and encouraging them to come and talk to us about our work. It definitely worked, and we got tons of people of all ages and backgrounds asking us all sorts of questions, many of which related to white holes (somewhat unsurprisingly I would say). Despite my throat being very sore from all the talking, it was a truly fun night, and I hope we inspired some of the younger minds to come and study physics!
