Summer Reading

Last year was "Fifty shades of Grey". This summer --no matter if you are sunbathing, hiking or enjoying desolated cities-- if you start pondering about black holes, superradiance, and related subjects, we got you covered:

The book will be soon available on the Springer webpage and on Amazon. Hurry up to buy a copy containing the typo in Vitor's name before they fix it. Those copies will be priceless hundred years from now :)

The book will be available in August but can be already pre-ordered. It costs $60 in the U.S. and about 45 Euros in Europe and the authors get about the 10% of the profit. This means that each of the authors (Richard, "Victor" and I) will get about 3 Euros for each sold copy. Taking "50 shades of Grey" as a reference, a back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests we might become rich in ~10^9 years.

CQG+ article on "Black-hole superradiance and the hunt for dark matter"

Our recent paper on black-hole superradiance has been highlighted in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, which contains a CQG+ Section where the authors of highlighted papers are asked to write informally about their work. You can find our contribution here:

http://cqgplus.com/2015/06/11/black-hole-superradiance-and-the-hunt-for-dark-matter/

Monte Carlo simulation of the end-state of the superradiant instability in the so-called “Regge plane”. Each point represents the final black-hole mass and spin after the superradiant evolution. As a result of the instability, old black holes do not populate the region above the green threshold curve, leaving a “hole” in the Regge plane as predicted by a linearized analysis. The experimental points with error bars refer to observed supermassive black holes. The three panels refer to different gas accretion rates.

Enjoy the reading!

Workshop + Conference @ The Fields Institute

"The year of the 100th anniversary of the formulation of Einstein's General Relativity will be remembered as the least productive one for the general-relativity community."

This is what I've heard more than once during the time spent at The Fields Institute in Toronto these weeks :-)
The Institute is organizing a long Focus Program to celebrate the centenary of one of Einstein's greatest achievements, the formulation of a relativistic theory of gravitational interactions, General Relativity for short.

The reason for the pessimist statement above is that this is only one of the numerous events that have been organized around the world to celebrate this important discovery. Now that the term ended, scientists are more free to travel to conferences and workshops and, to save time and money, it's very common to go directly from one conference to another on the week after. This does not leave too much time to sit down and do "actual" work.

Last week I've attended a very interesting workshop on Perturbation Theory which was organized here at the Field Institute as part of the Focus Program. This week instead the Institute is hosting a conference on Black Holes which ends today. Speakers at the conference included Clifford Will, Saul Teukolsky, Robert Wald, Eric Poisson, Gary Horowitz and William Unruh, to mention a few. Personally, I found the workshop much more stimulating and useful than the conference, but it's certainly suggestive to take the opportunity to discuss with some of the fathers of modern General Relativity.

This coming summer will be very busy with other events, especially in July and August, so I tend to agree that year 2015 will not be the most fruitful one in terms of actual work done.

On the other hand, do not underestimate the importance for the community to gather together and discuss open problems and (possibly) crazy ideas! Peer discussion and new collaborations are at the core of the scientific process and they are a crucial part of the duties of any scientist.  For this reason I am positive that the discussions and the collaborations that originate during these meetings will certainly contribute to solve open problems in the field and, who knows, perhaps the next breakthrough is just around the corner in 2016!

Doing a short tour of Toronto with Helvi Witek. Helvi was Ph.D. student in Lisbon when I moved there 4 years ago and she is now postdoc at Cambridge University working on numerical simulations of black-hole systems.

All roads lead to....

I didn't have much time to write lately. The reason is the map below, which shows the places i'll be visiting in the next 45 days... it's going to be a very busy period!

I'm flying tomorrow to Boston for 10 days, then I will attend 3 workshops (in Bremen, Toronto and Lisbon), a friend reunion in Barcelona, a wedding in my home town, Cagliari, and each time touching base in Rome (where all roads lead after all!). I am also co-organizing the NRHEP Meeting and will chair one parallel section at Marcel Grossman Meeting in July. Fortunately, these latter two will not involve any travel, since the venue will be Sapienza for both.

I'll try to report more or less constantly during this crazy schedule, especially from the conferences which looks very interesting and i'm pretty much looking forward to attend.

Jan Steinhoff @ Sapienza

Last week Jan Steinhoff from the Albert Einstein Institute visited our group in Rome, giving a seminar on "Effective action for compact objects and universal relations". Over the weekend, we went for some city sightseeing. Here, from left to right, Jan, Paolo and special guest Matteo are visiting the magnificient Caracalla's baths.

Recommended by us: A Cosmic Quest for Dark Matter

In the following I attached an article appeared two days ago in The Wall Street Journal about the DarkSide-50 experiment located in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, in which I am deeply involved since I am a member of the collaboration. I was there in those days and for this reason I know also some funny behind the scenes :)

By the way, I was lucky enough to see even more snow than that you see at the beginning of the video, thanks to a big snow storm that happened just a day after the realization of the following interview.

I have attached also some pictures of my stay during the DarkSide General meeting.

Enjoy the read!

“

A Cosmic Quest for Dark Matter 

Scientists are hunting one of the biggest prizes in physics: tiny particles called wimps that could unlock some of the universe’s oldest secrets

By GAUTAM NAIK
Feb. 13, 2015 1:32 pm E.T.

A mile under Italy's Gran Sasso mountain, scientists are seeking one of the smallest objects in the universe—and one of the most biggest prizes in physics: a wimp.

A wimp—a weakly interacting massive particle—is thought to be the stuff of dark matter, an invisible substance that makes up about a quarter of the universe but has never been seen by humans.

Gravity is the force that holds things together, and the vast majority of it emanates from dark matter. Ever since the big bang, this mystery material has been the universe’s prime architect, giving it shape and structure. Without dark matter, there would be no galaxies, no stars, no planets. Solving its mystery is crucial to understanding what the universe is made of.

Two Supposedly Fun Things I'll Never Do Again

Writing a review is like pregnancy (as far as I can imagine being pregnant and with due respect to real mothers...), one starts super-excited, then begins to realize the initial expectations were too optimistic and that the entire experience is going to be much tougher than originally expected; and while the "baby" is growing, everything becomes tougher and tougher, to the point that one starts looking forward to the delivery (and THAT is probably the toughest part).

This is why finishing two reviews (here and here) in the same week is pretty much like having a twin childbirth, and now I feel like one of those exhausted mothers who stares at their babies with extreme joy.

For those who missed the reference in the title, one of the best books ever..nothing less than a must-read! 

The first work is an overview on superradiance. [If you are curious about what superradiance is... well, read the book! Meanwhile, in very few words superradiance is a broad class of phenomena related to energy amplification in dissapative systems. Because of dissipation, in special kinematic configurations the energy stored in some body/medium can be transferred to another body or to radiation, thus producing a sort of amplifier].