And also this year I made it to the Top 2% scientists list. 🙂
I thank all my collaborators over the years, since nobody can succeed alone in science.
Last week (May 5 to 7 2025), I had the pleasure of attending the Relativistic Fluids around Compact Objects workshop, held at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center (CAMK) in Warsaw, Poland. This event brought together leading experts in astrophysics to discuss the latest advancements in GRMHD simulations and their implications for compact objects like black holes and neutron stars.
The workshop covered a wide range of topics, and I had the opportunity to present my recent results in the modeling of multi-messenger signals from accreting supermassive black hole mergers (slides available here).
The workshop provided a fantastic opportunity to connect with colleagues, exchange ideas, and explore potential collaborations. I’m grateful to the organizers for putting together such a well-structured event and to everyone who attended my talk.
The University of Milano-Bicocca has just analyzed the recently published list of the top 2% scientists produced by Stanford University. I was happy to know that also my name is in that list.
More details can be found in the Milano-Bicocca University page.
My former master student Sofia Maggioni won the 2022 INFN prize “Milla Baldo Ceolin” for the best theses in the field of theoretical physics. Her master thesis was titled “Fully Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Spinning Massive Black Hole Binaries” and she worked under my supervision and in collaboration with Prof. Monica Colpi and Mr. Federico Cattorini.
The news, in Italian, can be found on the Bicocca news blog.
We submitted a new paper investigating the dynamics of magnetized plasma accreting onto merging supermassive black holes including, for the first time, the effect of misaligned black hole spins.
The purpose of simulations like these is to investigate possible electromagnetic emission that could be generated by these systems. Supermassive black hole mergers are powerful sources of gravitational waves that will be detected by the future LISA mission, but, as simulations like ours show, they could also produce electromagnetic counterparts, that could be detected by future X-ray observatories, such as Athena.
After almost two years I attended an in-person conference. It was the XXIV Conference of the Italian Society of General Relativity and Gravitation (SIGRAV) at the University of Urbino (Italy). I gave an invited plenary talk on “GRMHD Simulations of Compact Object Binaries”. The pdf version of my talk can be found on the conference webpage.
The Einstein Toolkit school took place the last week of July online. All lectures were recorded and they can be found on the school web page.
I gave a lecture on how to use binary neutron star initial data generated with the LORENE code Bin_star. The recording can be seen below, while the material used for the lecture can be found here.
Our first paper on our new code Spritz has been published on Classical and Quantum Gravity. The code is also publicly available on Zenodo. This first paper presents tests in special and general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics. We are currently working on a second paper that will present our current tests of its equation of state driver and neutrino emission scheme.
The code will then be used for numerical relativity simulations of neutron star binary mergers.
This week I participated at two very interesting workshops at the Rochester Institute of Technology: the Einstein Toolkit and the TCAN meeting. I gave a talk on wednesday presenting some applications of my WhiskyMHD code to binary neutron star mergers (below you can find the YouTube video of my talk).
Both workshops were successful and with very interesting discussions about the future of the Einstein Toolkit and our plan for the next year of our TCAN international collaboration funded by NASA. Many young researchers joined both meetings indicating a strong potential growth for the field of numerical relativity applied at astrophysical sources.
Oggi, su invito degli studenti e delle studentesse di UNITiN, ho presentato i risultati della collaborazione Event Horizon Telescope. Le slides del mio seminario sono adesso disponibili in formato pdf. Il video del seminario è al momento accessibile via Facebook. PiĂą di 300 studenti sono stati presenti all’evento che è stato anche trasmesso in diretta video via Facebook. Il lavoro svolto dall’associazione UNITiN è stato eccellente come al solito e mi ha fatto piacere partecipare.