When I attend talks I try to write down three insights that stroke me the most. I heard the idea somewhere and think it’s a good habit.

Terence Tao, Riemann Prize Lecture:

  • Analyzing a variation of the problem can help you rule out strategies that rest on their common features
  • The main reason for problems with Navier-Stokes in 3 dimensions is a d/2 critical exponent
  • When you come up with counterexamples you must design them with the ingenuity of an engineer

“Come fotografare l’indescrivibile”, 5th International Light Day

Daniele Faccio:

  • An object falling into a black hole gains negative energy/modes
  • Some white things like snow or clouds are not really white, they just scatter
  • External insulation foam shares about the same light scattering properties of the human brain

Some girl working with cultural goods:

  • If you need so, you can tune two artificial light sources so that at every moment only one source lights the target
  • When probing a material with (e.g. uv) light, a short video of it interacting with short pulses tells more than a single photo of the object lighted by it

Giovanni Chesi:

  • Second order autocorrelation functions measure how much a system is quantum
  • Photons work well to exchange signals (e.g. quantum communication) because they hardly interact with anything
  • One goal of operational probability theories is to promote time itself with an operator

Some aesthetician girl:

  • Photoacoustic effect
  • Red tattoos are the most painful to remove
  • You can build tractor beams in water by fine tuning waves (or laser pulses that generate them)

Simone Trevisan:

  • Quantum tunneling plays a role in Hawking radiation
  • You can have subcritical radiation even in the absence of a horizon (???)

Alberto Porzio, on the GINGER experiment

  • Measuring small general relativistic contributions to Earth’s rotation can help rule out alternative theories of gravity
  • If you measure Earth’s rotation to like one part in a trillion you start to sense things such as earthquakes, cars behind a mountain, Moon fases, variations in sea levels, the wind…
  • The main problem in their Sagnac gyroscope is backscattering

Didattica della fisica insubria

Oksana Mishina:

  • The Russian vowel reduction /e/ to /i/ is more difficult to lose in Italian than the /o/ to /a/ one.
  • /s/ easily retroflexize
  • /l/ easily velarizes

Some Neapolitan:

  • Some Italians with soft /r/ also rotacize /l/ and pronounce it in the same softened way.
  • Corbach’s parameters can be raised by using multiple tiers and levels of agreement in Likerts.
  • But simply adding a “maybe I agree” possible answer can lead to more uncertain evaluations.

Some Milanese:

  • Physical concepts don’t exist until you include them in a theory, and this is especially true for quantum mechanics.
  • Invisibile waves, like wavefunctions, not alike sea waves and such, inherently require a complex phase to be explained.
  • Most highschool teachers still rely on Old Quantum Physics and must be instructed on its pitfalls and solutions.

Some theoretical physicist:

  • We have to switch our focus from quantum systems to quantum objects to exploit all the power of the second quantum revolution
  • The core of quantum mechanics can be packed into qubits and quantum information in general.
  • A qubit is a fermionic oscillator.

Maria Bondani:

  • Carlo Ghirardi’s book
  • The Great Bell Test
  • Single-photon Mach-Zender into highschools

Sara Satanassi:

  • Recreate classical experiments
  • Mechanical realization of logic gates
  • Quantum Manifesto?

Some Trentino guy:

  • Students find it more interesting to build experiments in the kitchen than with standard laboratory items.
  • Augmented reality laboratory.

Some Pavia guy:

  • {Insert text}’s machines are single molecule machines that appear to violate the 2nd principle of thermodynamics.
  • Deutsches algorithm is like a quantum Fourier transform
  • Using the quantum information/only software approach may appeal only to more computer-oriented students.

OFIS 2022, on metamaterials

Carlo Rizza:

  • Surface plasmon polaritons are waves of what?
  • Every light source also emits evanescent waves, and Pendry’s lens can amplify them to give a fuller imaging.
  • This is possible because evanescent waves don’t carry energy.

Vincenzo Galdi:

  • 6G is a thing.
  • Performing Mathematical Operations with Metamaterials
  • Adidas metamaterials.

Giovanni Isella:

  • Accelerometers are made of MEMSs.
  • Reattori a deposizione.
  • Quantum well and cascade lasers.

Stefania Benedetti:

  • Altering the surface to volume ratio can fine tune many properties. Perovskites can substitute silicium in semiconductors but can be modeled in granular shapes with more open surface than plates.
  • Cerium oxide doped with silver can catalyze hydrogen combustion almost as well as platinum at a fraction of the cost.
  • Piezoelectric and Seebek effect nanogenerators.

Valentina De Renzi:

  • Geca adhere to walls using a lot Van der Waals boundings, applications.
  • Butterflies achieve blue by a stack of thin films that iridesce like soap bubbles.
  • Moth eye antireflection photovoltaic cells.

University of Insubria October 2022 graduations

Enrico Carnelli:

  • Why don’t BBHs have spin while XRBs do?
  • When the net spin is nonzero we know the two black holes spins are aligned and perpendicular to the orbital plane.
  • Zero net spin can on the contrary occur from many antialigned spin directions.

Ylenia Mascolo:

  • Some black holes come in limited edition: most massive black holes formed around a billion years after Big Bang. Will there be another limited editions?
  • What is the ratio between the mass of dying star and that of the black hole it becomes?
  • Can bound systems of seeds of different galaxies collide when the galaxies do? I’ve been told collisions are unlikely due to the emptiness of space.

Gabriele Cendese:

  • How many other Alices and Bobs are there to include in a quantum information presentation?
  • Why 6?
  • Doing random things won’t always yield random things.
  • Minimum number of gates required to shuffle a qubit ~ Fredkin?
  • Connectivity can be more important than gate error. Is there a functional relation?

Marco Galoppo:

  • BG gravity gives you faster-than-light trajectories in the galaxy bulge, but it is no surprise because axial symmetry cannot account for that zone.
  • Limit processes involving the metric can yield different answers if you group terms in different ways.
  • When considering the optical metric you find off-diagonal terms give rise to a sort of electromagnetic field. Is this general?

Andrià something:

  • The standard model of cosmology is a mess.
  • One could make a rigorous science from trying to fit everything