Space Lasers and Aliens: Searching for optical transients with Gamma-ray Light Buckets Imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) are among the largest and fastest optical telescopes in the world, ideally suited to searching for nanosecond-timescale optical transients. These could be astrophysical in nature, or even associated with signals transmitted by extra-terrestrial...
Search for primordial black hole dark matter with X-ray satellites and prospects for future missions Ultralight primordial black holes (PBHs) in the mass range of 1016 - 1022 g are allowed by current observations to constitute a significant fraction, if not all, of the dark matter in the Universe. In...
First Results from the eROSITA All-Sky Survey: An Open Window to Precision Cosmology Clusters of galaxies trace the highest peaks in the cosmic density field and offer an independent and powerful probe of the growth of structure and cosmology. Locating clusters through well-planned multi-wavelength surveys is crucial for testing gravitational...
Neutrinos, Quantum Gravity and the Big Questions - New Ideas for New Data Neutrinos are perfect probes of quantum gravity. The particles’ weak interactions allow to preserve quantum coherence for very long timespans, and neutrino telescopes have started to collect data of neutrinos at extreme energies that have travelled extra-galactic...
News from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and Related Phenomenology It has been ten years since IceCube, a neutrino detector embedded in the Antarctic glacier, has detected high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. In this informal talk, I will report on the latest results from IceCube and point out opportunities for searches for new...
Community, Standardisation, and Reproducibility: does open-source software help advancing high-energy astrophysics? In this talk, I will discuss how high-energy astrophysics, and gamma-ray astronomy in particular, are being transformed by several community-based efforts to develop standardised data and open-source software both for statistical analysis and physical modelling. In the first part...
Pulsar polarization: explanations and applications Pulsar radio emission, and particularly its polarization, is a key probe of neutron star physics. This, in turn, means that we can use it to advance searches for gravitational waves and to map out the invisible structures of the galaxy. However, new and improved observations...
Machine Learning: from Quantum Technologies to Neuromorphic Devices
Evidence for high-energy neutrinos from the Galactic plane The Milky Way, our home galaxy, is visible to the eye as a faint band of light in the night sky. This emission from the Galactic plane extends over a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to gamma rays. A...
Looking for dark matter in gamma rays - can machine learning help? We live in a ‘golden’ time for studies of high-energy (HE) astrophysics as a series of satellite and ground based telescopes currently provide high-precision data, critical to answer the century old questions on the origin of cosmic rays...
Civilian and military use of nuclear technology To exploit nuclear technology for civilian purposes, in particular energy production, a variety of facilities - a nuclear fuel cycle - is necessary, comprising reactors and uranium enrichment plants among others. These same facilities, however, produce the fissile materials that are required to...
Exploring the signatures of cosmic ray feedback effects in galaxy ecosystems Cosmic rays go hand-in-hand with violent and energetic astrophysical conditions. They are an active agent within galactic and circumgalactic ecosystems, where they can deposit energy and momentum, modify the circulation of baryons, and even have the potential to regulate...