Several theories beyond the Standard Model predict the occurrence of Domain Walls (DW), topological defects expected to arise from the breaking of a discrete symmetry in the early universe. The motion and the eventual annihilation of these objects are expected to generate a stochastic background of gravitational waves (SGWB), that could in principle be probed by ground-based GW detectors. In...
Understanding how new physics influences the dynamics of cosmic neutrinos is crucial in light of upcoming precise cosmological observations and the need to reconcile the complementarity between cosmological and laboratory probes. In this talk, I discuss novel insights on neutrino evolution in the presence of new physics at MeV temperatures - at the edge of the times that can be probed by BBN...
Precision measurements by AMS reveal unique properties of cosmic charged elementary particles. In the absolute rigidity range ~60 to ~500 GV, the antiproton flux and proton flux have nearly identical rigidity dependence. This behavior indicates an excess of high energy antiprotons compared with secondary antiprotons produced from the collision of cosmic rays. More importantly, from ~60 to ~500...
The duration of the neutrino burst from the supernova event SN 1987A is known to be sensitive to exotic sources of cooling, such as axions radiated from the dense and hot hadronic matter thought to constitute the inner core of the supernova. We perform the first quantitative study of the role of hadronic matter beyond the first generation -- in particular strange matter. We do so by...
Cosmological inflation is nowadays a well established paradigm to solve the classical problems of the standard model of Cosmology and to generate the primordial density perturbations giving rise to the present Universe structure. The achievements of inflation usually require the presence of one or several scalar field, the inflaton, giving rise to physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) of...
We compute the causality/positivity bounds on the Wilson coefficients of scalar-tensor effective field theories. Two-sided bounds are obtained by extracting IR information from UV physics via dispersion relations of scattering amplitudes, making use of the full crossing symmetry. The graviton t-channel pole is carefully treated in the numerical optimization, taking into account the constraints...
The High-Energy Particle Detector 01 (HEPD-01) is one of the payloads on board the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite (CSES-01). CSES-01 was the first multi-channel space observatory of a series of planned missions devoted to monitoring perturbations in electromagnetic fields, plasma and charged particle fluxes induced by natural sources and artificial emitters in near-Earth space. It was...
In March 2025, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) released its last cosmological analysis along with a new cosmic microwave background (CMB) dataset. The sixth data release (DR6), including data collected from 2017 to 2022, covers 40% of the sky at arcminute resolution providing the most precise maps of CMB temperature and polarization. In this talk, I will give an overview of the ACT DR6...
The Dark energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is measuring spectra of millions of distant galaxies and
quasars over a five-year period that started in spring 2021. A 3D map of the universe is built from the observations
and statistical methods applied to this map allows to place strong constraints on the underlying cosmological
Model. The main probe used in the data analysis is the...
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is set to begin survey operations by the end of this year.
This groundbreaking facility will transform our understanding of the universe across a broad range of science cases in optical astronomy. LSST will perform a comprehensive inventory of Solar System objects, including the identification of potentially hazardous...
Lattice simulation of QCD at small net baryon densities and high temperature have revealed that the transition to hadronic phase to the deconfined quark-gluon plasma is a crossover. Recently, the structure of neutron stars have been studied with a crossover equation of state by means of a switching function to model a smooth transition from a pure neutron matter to massless quarks. The switch...
The nature of dark energy is one of the most pressing open questions in physics. While the standard ΛCDM model assumes a static cosmological constant, alternative approaches suggest a dynamical scalar field as the source of cosmic acceleration. In this work, we propose a shockwave-driven model, where dark energy emerges as a high-energy vacuum excitation of a gravitationally coupled scalar...
Analysis of anisotropy of the arrival directions of galactic positrons, electrons and protons has been performed with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station. This measurement allows to differentiate between point-like and diffuse sources of cosmic rays for the understanding of the origin of high energy positrons. The AMS results of the dipole anisotropy are...
A method of general applicability has been developed, whereby the null geodesic equations of the Einstein-Straus-de Sitter metric can be integrated simultaneously in terms of the curvature constant k. The purpose is to generalize the computation of light deflection and time delay by a spherical mass distribution. Assuming a flat Universe with most recent measurements of the Hubble constant H₀...
Heavy particle production through coupling with the inflaton field, during inflation, can lead to time-dependent and scale non-invariant curvature perturbations. These perturbations are preserved on superhorizon scales and imprint local temperature deviations, hot and cold spots, in the CMB.
Hot or cold spots can also be a result of tachyonic Higgs production, since the Standard Model Higgs...
Domain walls are a type of topological defect that can arise in the early universe after the spontaneous breaking of a discrete symmetry. This occurs in several beyond Standard Model theories with an extended Higgs sector, such as the Next-to-Two-Higgs-Doublet model (N2HDM). In this talk, I will discuss the domain wall solution related to the singlet scalar of the N2HDM as well as demonstrate...
With the immense number of images, data and sources that Euclid will deliver, the consortium will be in a unique position to create/provide/construct legacy catalogs, with exquisite imaging quality and superb Near Infrared Spectroscopy, with impact on may areas of galaxy science. This talk will review the current results and prospects that Euclid will be able to achieve in areas of Galaxy...
Euclid will observe 15000 deg2 of the darkest sky that is free of contamination by light from our Galaxy and our Solar System. Three “Euclid Deep Fields” covering around 40 deg2 in total will be also observed extending the scientific scope of the mission the high-redshift universe. The complete survey represents hundreds of thousands images and several tens of Petabytes of data. About 10...
The Next-to-Two-Higgs-Doublet model (N2HDM) has a rich vacuum structure where multiple electroweak (EW) breaking minima, as well as CP and electric-charge breaking minima, can coexist. These minima can be deeper than the electroweak vacuum $v_{ew} \approx 246\text{ GeV}$ of our universe, making our vacuum metastable. In such a case, one needs to calculate the tunneling rate from the EW vacuum...
The Galactic plane is full of bright gamma-ray sources whose astrophysical nature remains unknown. The region surrounding the second most powerful pulsar in our galaxy, PSR J1813-1749, hosts one of such intriguing sources. Multiwavelength observations of this region show a multitude of sources, including a pulsar wind nebula (PWN) embedded in a supernova remnant (SNR) in X-rays and also SNRs...
Gamma-ray astronomy offers a unique window into the most extreme environments of the Universe, enabling the study of cosmic particle acceleration, high-energy emission mechanisms, and potential signatures of dark matter and fundamental physics. In recent years, the field has witnessed significant progress, driven by observations from space-based instruments such as Fermi-LAT and ground-based...
Gravitational and Structural Modifications of Compact Objects due to Quadrupole Moments in General Relativity
This study investigates the gravitational behavior of compact astrophysical objects, specifically white dwarfs and neutron stars, within Einstein’s General Relativity framework. We incorporate the quadrupole moment in a first-order approximation to analyze how deviations from...
The deflection of light in the gravitational field of the Sun is one of the most fundamental consequences for general relativity as well as one of its classical tests first performed by Eddington a century ago. However, despite its center stage role in modern physics, no experiment has tested it in an ostensibly quantum regime where both matter and light exhibit non-classical features. This...
One of the open questions of astrophysics is the mass composition of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). The flux of UHECRs is extremely low, demanding large observatories for indirect measurements of cosmic-ray air showers, cascades of secondary particles created by interactions of the cosmic ray with the atmosphere.
Located in Argentina, the Pierre Auger Observatory is the largest...
The Pierre Auger Collaboration has performed a dedicated search for upward-going air showers using the Fluorescence Detector (FD), motivated by the two "anomalous" radio pulses reported by the ANITA experiment that are difficult to reconcile with expectations from the Standard Model. While ultrahigh-energy (UHE) neutrinos can traverse the Earth and initiate Earth-skimming showers interacting...
The effect long wavelength cosmological perturbations (soft cosmological modes) can be captured analytically by solution-generating techniques based on large gauge diffeomorphism. This enable one to construct exact solutions of the linearized Einstein equations which described a perturbed FLRW background up to some given order in the multipole expansion of the cosmological perturbations. In...
This year, the KM3NeT observatory published the detection of the most energetic neutrino candidate ever observed, with an energy between 72 PeV and 2.6 EeV at the 90% confidence level. This extreme energy makes the observed neutrino event very likely being of cosmic origin and not produced within the Earth's atmosphere. However, the exact origin is unknown. In this talk, the possibility that...
The precision measurements of the cosmic-ray positron and electron fluxes collected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station are presented. The positron flux exhibits complex energy dependence. It is described by the sum of a term associated with the positrons produced in the collision of cosmic rays, which dominates at low energies, and a new source term, which...
The KM3NeT Collaboration is currently deploying two neutrino telescopes deep in the Mediterranean Sea. Both detectors share the same technology but are different in their size due to their different physics goals. The KM3NeT/ARCA telescope is located at about 3.5 km depth off-shore Sicily, Italy, while KM3NeT/ORCA is at about 2.5 km depth close to Toulon, France. The detectors are currently...
As of today, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration has cataloged nearly 200 GW detections from various compact object mergers. These discoveries began the endeavors to search for other kinds of GW sources. Among these, the Gravitational-Wave Background (GWB), arising as the superposition of individually undetectable cosmological and/or astrophysical sources, is one of the potential sources to...
The Pierre Auger Observatory, the largest air-shower experiment in the world designed to investigate ultra-high-energy (UHE, E $\gtrsim10^{17}\,$eV) cosmic rays, offers unparalleled sensitivity to UHE photons. These are expected from interactions of UHE cosmic rays with background radiation fields, as well as from more exotic scenarios such as the decay of super-heavy dark matter (SHDM)...
Euclid is a mission of the European Space Agency designed to constrain the properties of dark energy and gravity via weak gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering. After its launch in July 1st, 2023 it is carrying out a wide area imaging and spectroscopy survey (the Euclid Wide Survey: EWS) in visible and near- infrared bands, covering approximately 15000 deg2 of extragalactic sky in six...
Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) collaborations use a collection of pulsars in the Milky Way to detect gravitational waves in the nanohertz band by measuring tiny shifts in pulse arrival times. In this talk, I will briefly summarise the recent strong evidence for a gravitational wave background, together with astrophysical and cosmological interpretations of the PTA observation. I will conclude by...
The POEMMA-Balloon with Radio (PBR) mission is a pathfinder project for the Probe Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (POEMMA), a proposed dual-satellite observatory designed to explore the highest energy regimes in the Universe. Scheduled for launch in Spring 2027 from Wanaka, New Zealand, PBR will fly aboard a NASA Super-Pressure Balloon for a mission duration of up to 50 days over the...
The Pierre Auger Observatory has been on the astroparticle scene for over twenty years now. It's a mature player in this field, yet it retains all its vitality to provide data whose richness sheds light not only on the origin of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs), but also on high-energy hadronic interactions, multi-messenger astrophysics, beyond Standard Model (BSM) physics and...
We present high-precision measurements of cosmic ray nuclei spectra spanning elements from Z=1 (protons) through Z=20 (calcium), and including Z=26 (iron) and Z=28 (nickel), as measured by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. The analysis reveals new properties concerning both primary and secondary cosmic rays, with particular emphasis on their distinctive spectral structures. These findings...
We present the latest population-level results from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration, based on the growing catalog of gravitational-wave detections from compact binary coalescences. Leveraging data from the O1–O3 observing runs, and incorporating advanced statistical inference techniques, we explore the underlying astrophysical distributions of binary black holes (BBHs), binary neutron...
X-ray polarimetry is an observational technique with the potential to enrich our understanding of high-energy astrophysics by enabling the measurement of the polarization of X-rays emitted by exotic cosmic phenomena such as black holes, neutron stars, Gamma-Ray Bursts and more. This technique provides crucial insights into the magnetic field geometries, intensities, and emission mechanisms of...
