My group is hosting quite a few visitors this semester. We’re alive!
October 13, 2022
Category Archives: Milano
October 12, 2022
The group gets larger
So many new people are joining us this Fall! Michele Mancarella is joining us as a postdoc supported by my ERC grant. He’s moving from Geneva (Switzerland) brings with him some new activities on gravitational-wave cosmology, because astronomy was not … Continue reading
September 29, 2022
Postdoctoral fellowships in gravitational-wave astronomy at Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
The University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) invites expressions of interest for postdoctoral positions in gravitational-wave astronomy. Successful candidates will join the group of Prof. Davide Gerosa and will be part of the “GWmining” project funded by the European Research Council. Targeted … Continue reading
September 21, 2022
Andrea and Oliver are the new black-hole experts in town!
Wooo! What an amazing performance by two of my students today, who defended their BSc and MSc degrees! Oliver Rossi discussed his BSc project on black holes with large spins completed in collaboration with Viola De Renzis (PhD student in … Continue reading
September 19, 2022
Job opportunities for Marie Curie past holders and applicants
The Italian government has pushed a hiring program dedicated to holders and applicants of Marie Curie Fellowships from the EU. The call targets those that have either (i) completed a successful Marie Curie Fellowship in the past 4 years or … Continue reading
August 30, 2022
Italy has a brand new Center for Supercomputing (ICSC)… and we’re on it!
The Italian government is pushing a major inverstment program in High-Performance Computing, and we’re part of it! The new ICSC (Italian Center for Supercomputing) will manage >300M Euros going towards early-career researchers, PhD scholarships, and computing infrastructure. The University of … Continue reading
July 4, 2022
Characterization of merging black holes with two precessing spins
Lots of “firsts” today! My first-year PhD student Viola just put out her first first-author paper. This is about measuring black holes with not one, but two precessing spins. People have been trying to figure out how to tell if … Continue reading
June 3, 2022
Super Arianna!
Very happy to report that Arianna Renzini (currently a postdoc at Caltech) was awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Union, to be hosted here with my group. Arianna will bring expertise in modeling the gravitational-wave stochastic background, … Continue reading
June 1, 2022
New summer means new summer projects
We’re having four (!) summer students joining the group this year! Diego Padilla Monroy from Florida International University (Miami) will be working with me in Milan supported by the IREU program. Derin Sivrioglu from Grinnell College (Iowa) will be working … Continue reading
May 25, 2022
Which black hole formed first? Mass-ratio reversal in massive binary stars from gravitational-wave data
Big stars burn everything they have, die fast, and produce big black holes. So when you see two black holes together, it’s likely that the big black hole comes from the big star. Or maybe not? Before dying, the big … Continue reading
May 4, 2022
New horizons for fundamental physics with LISA
Another short post today, but it’s not just astrophysics that will be awesome with LISA, but fundamental physics too! Here is the white paper of the relevant LISA working group. Get ready to test your wildest ideas, my theory friend! … Continue reading
April 26, 2022
PhD in gravitational physics!
The University of Milano-Bicocca welcomes applications for Ph.D. scholarships. The application deadline is May 20th, 2022 for positions starting in the Fall of 2022: https://en.unimib.it/education/postgraduates/doctoral-research-phd-programmes/applying-doctorate/calls-application In particular, the theoretical astrophysics group is looking for strong, highly motivated candidates to join … Continue reading
April 22, 2022
Long-term research appointment in computational astrophysics at Milano-Bicocca (Italy)
The University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) invites expressions of interest for a 3+2 year research position in HPC applications to astrophysics. The astrophysics group at Milano-Bicocca provides a vibrant environment with expertise covering all aspects of gravitational-wave astronomy, relativistic astrophysics, galactic … Continue reading
April 21, 2022
Got an ISCRA-B supercomputer allocation!
I was just awarded a large allocation on the Italian national supercomputer at CINECA. My PhD student Viola De Renzis (our parameter-estimation expert!) is the co-I on our proposal. Our award is part of the so-called ISCRA Class B program … Continue reading
April 8, 2022
The last three years: multiband gravitational-wave observations of stellar-mass binary black hole
Observing gravitational waves from the ground (i.e. LIGO, Virgo, etc) give us a unique view on “the last three minutes” of the life of compact objects before they merge with each other. Going to space (I’m talking to you, LISA!) … Continue reading
April 4, 2022
Constraining black-hole binary spin precession and nutation with sequential prior conditioning
Daria’s new paper is out! (With key contributions from others in the group… This is also Viola’s first paper!). Here we look at sub-dominant black-hole spin effects in current data from LIGO and Virgo (yeah sorry guys… our black-hole spin … Continue reading
March 11, 2022
Astrophysics with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
LISA astrophysics is awesome and everything you might ever want to know is written this paper. [Sorry for the short blog post, but there isn’t much else to say really…] A huge thanks to all the captains that put this … Continue reading
March 9, 2022
Deep learning and Bayesian inference of gravitational-wave populations: hierarchical black-hole mergers
It took a while (so many technical challenges…) but we made it! Matt‘s monster paper is finally out! Let me introduce a fully-fledged pipeline to study populations of gravitational-wave events with deep learning. If it sounds cool, well, it is … Continue reading
March 2, 2022
New class! Astrostatistics
I just had the first lectures of a class I’m teaching for the first time: Astrostatistics and Machine Learning (sounds exciting? Well, it is!). This is an advanced course for the MSc degree in Astrophysics and Space Science at the … Continue reading
February 23, 2022
Congrats Cecilia!
Huge congrats to my student Cecilia Fabbri who got her Bachelor’s degree today. Cecilia defended (quite brilliantly!) her project titled “Constraining the black-hole irreducible mass with current gravitational-wave data”. Her work ended up in our recent draft (arxiv:2202.08848). Cecilia is … Continue reading
February 21, 2022
The irreducible mass of LIGO’s black holes
Spinning black holes are weird (well, all black holes are weird but those that spin are the worse!). They have a funny thing called ergoregion where orbiting particles can have negative energy. Penrose was the first to realize that this … Continue reading
January 20, 2022
People visiting
Traveling is (kind of) coming back, and we’re having lots of visitors around, all supported by external research grants (congrats folks, you’re great!) Daria Gangardt is visiting Milan from Birmingham for 6 months from January to July, supported by a … Continue reading
January 7, 2022
Cariplo Foundation Grant
I’m very happy to share that I was awarded a 330k EUR grant from the Cariplo Foundation. Cariplo is a trust that supports scientific research in the Lombardy region of Italy. Our proposal is titled “Deep into the relativistic two-body … Continue reading
December 6, 2021
TEONGRAV
My group and I are now part of TEONGRAV, which is the Italian national initiative dedicated to gravitational theory and phenomenology. TEONGRAV is run by the INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics) and, besides the other folks here in Milan, … Continue reading
November 17, 2021
The Bardeen-Petterson effect in accreting supermassive black-hole binaries: disc breaking and critical obliquity
Breaking things is fun! In the previous paper of this series, we looked at accretion disks around massive black-hole binaries and found things were going awry. We kept on finding configurations that our implementation could not handle… And now we … Continue reading
October 13, 2021
Gravitational-wave population inference at past time infinity
Great Scott, a new paper! When analyzing gravitational-wave data, looking at one black hole at a time is not enough anymore, the fun part is looking at them all together. The issue Matt and I are tackling here is that … Continue reading
October 4, 2021
Postdoctoral fellowships in gravitational-wave astronomy at Milan-Bicocca (Italy)
The University of Milan-Bicocca (Italy) invites expressions of interest for postdoctoral positions in gravitational-wave astronomy. Successful candidates will join Prof. Davide Gerosa and will constitute the core team of the “GWmining” project funded by the European Research Council. Targeted investigations … Continue reading
September 18, 2021
Welcome Viola!
Viola De Renzis is the latest addition to our group! Viola graduated from Rome “La Sapienza” with an MSc thesis on exotic compact objects and is now starting her PhD with me at Milan-Bicocca. Viola plays guitar, arguably better than … Continue reading
September 8, 2021
SIGRAV Prize for Young Researchers
It is a true honor to receive the career Prize for Young Researchers of the Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitational Physics (SIGRAV). I was awarded the prize in the class of relativistic astrophysics. It’s amazing to be recognized … Continue reading
September 1, 2021
Moving (back to) Milan!
We moved! I’ve had the opportunity to relocate to Milan, in the north of Italy, very close to where I’m from. I’m now an Associate Professor at the University of Milan-Bicocca, one of the two campuses in the beautiful city … Continue reading
May 18, 2021
Come to Milan for a PhD!
The University of Milano-Bicocca welcomes applications for Ph.D. scholarships. The application deadline is June 16th, 2021 for positions to start later in 2021: https://en.unimib.it/education/doctoral-research-phd-programmes/how-apply-phd-programme In particular, I am looking for a strong, highly motivated candidate to join my newly established research … Continue reading
February 18, 2013
Resonant-plane locking and spin alignment in stellar-mass black-hole binaries: a diagnostic of compact-binary formation
Spin precession in stellar-mass black hole binaries encodes information on specific formation mechanisms like tides and mass transfers. My first paper on spin precession… Davide Gerosa, Michael Kesden, Emanuele Berti, Richard O’Shaughnessy, Ulrich Sperhake.Physical Review D 87 (2013) 10, 104028.arXiv:1302.4442 … Continue reading
November 1, 2012
Black hole mergers: do gas discs lead to spin alignment?
My very first paper was on alignment between supermassive black holes and their accretion disks. Maybe it takes a bit longer… Giuseppe Lodato, Davide Gerosa. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters 429 (2013) L30-L34.arXiv:1211.0284 [astro-ph.CO].