Séminaire

Late-time signal from binary black hole coalescences

Recently, studies on numerical evolutions of eccentric binary inspirals found a several orders of magnitude enhancement of the post-ringdown tail amplitude. This characteristic might render the tail a phenomenon of observational interest, opening the way to experimental verification of this general relativistic prediction in the near future. I will present an analytical perturbative model that accurately predicts the numerically observed tail evolution.

Classical and stochastic calculations for inflationary correlators

The statistics of primordial scalar perturbations play a crucial role in providing phenomenological constraints for new inflationary models. In particular, the probability of unlikely large scalar perturbations (leading to primordial black hole formation) and the concurrent GW backgrounds are very sensitive to the tail of the PDF of primordial curvature perturbations. We analyse such tails in inflationary models featuring an ultra-slow roll phase, known to enhance both the amplitude and non-Gaussianity of curvature perturbations at small scales.

A Big Telescope and a Big Computer: How HPC and AI Will Enable Next Breakthroughs in Our Understanding of the Universe

The upcoming mega-telescopes, such as European Space Agency’s recently launched Euclid satellite, and the upcoming radio Square Kilometer Array (SKA), will provide images of our universe over 10 billion years of cosmic history, and enable us to study its evolution with unprecedented level of detail. In the framework of simulations-based inference, the big telescopes deliver a throve of high-resolution observations and big computers provide the feature-rich numerical theory prediction.

Ultra-high energy cosmic rays: Constraints on the maximum-energy distribution of the sources and the possible role of ultra-fast outflows in active galactic nuclei s and high energy neutrinos

An open question in the search for ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray (UHECR) sources is whether they are few and prominent or if a large population of sources collectively contributes to the diffuse flux. Motivated by this question, we investigated whether the latest UHECR data are consistent with originating from a population of sources that exhibit substantial diversity in terms of the cosmic-ray spectra they produce. We found that the fit to the cosmic ray data requires sources that are intrinsically very similar in terms of the maximum energy reached.

Scalar perturbations from inflationary magnetogenesis

Primordial non-Gaussianities, though yet unobserved, remain an important observable since they can help differentiate various models of inflation. This necessitates a deep understanding of the various processes that could contribute to these non-Gaussianities, with inflationary magnetogenesis being one of them. Often, the spectrum and the bispectrum of the perturbations produced during inflation are studied under the assumption that the metric perturbations can be neglected and that all the relevant physics resides in the coupling of the inflaton and the gauge fields.

An obstruction to positivity bounds with spontaneously broken Lorentz invariance

Positivity bounds are a set of consistency conditions that EFTs shall obey in order to admit a sensible UV completion. Generically, they arise as inequalities for the Wilson coefficients of the low-energy theory and, in the Lorentz invariant framework, they are extracted exploiting the analyticity properties of the S-Matrix. 

The (micro-)physics of neutron stars from multi-messenger observations

The first detection of gravitational waves from a merging neutron star
binary system and the accompanying observations of electromagnetic
counterparts in 2017 demonstrated the enormous potential of
multi-messenger astronomy for understanding the properties of
ultra-dense (and hot) matter. Neutron stars --relict of the
gravitational collapse and subsequent supernova explosion of a massive
star at the end of his life-- comprise the highest densities of matter
that can stably exist in the Universe. During this talk, I will

Fantastic higher-curvature gravities and where to find them

Higher-curvature gravities are theories of gravity including terms of higher order in the space-time curvature. They arise naturally when considering an effective approach to gravity. In this talk, I will focus on higher-curvature gravities satisfying two properties: the differential order of their equations of motion gets reduced when restricted to certain specific backgrounds and form a basis for the space of effective theories of gravity.

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