The nuclear equation of state (EoS) at zero temperature (T) can be expressed as the energy (E) per particle (A) or pressure (P=–∂E/∂V for A=constant) of an uniform system of neutrons and protons in their ground state. This ideal system is of particular interest for different reasons: i) Coulomb and finite-size effects are avoided (by construction) making comparisons among different models...
Modern, ground and space based observatories have provided us with a wide range of observations from different epochs of the Universe. Despite these efforts, the Universe before Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) remains obscure to us. Then, the measurements of the primordial abundances of light elements are key when exploring theories for the early Universe. In this talk, I will discuss the...
Star clusters play a key role in shaping the population of compact-object binaries observed through gravitational waves, but modeling their long-term evolution across a wide range of initial conditions remains computationally challenging. Fast and physically motivated models are therefore essential.
I will present an updated version of the clusterBHBdynamics code, a rapid framework for...
When strongly interacting matter is heated to extraordinarily high temperatures, it undergoes a transition to the quark–gluon plasma, a state of matter that behaves as an almost perfect fluid, characterized by a remarkably small shear viscosity to entropy density ratio. Understanding how this collective behavior emerges from the underlying microscopic dynamics is a central goal of heavy-ion...
PhotSat is the first astrophysical satellite developed from design to operations by the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) and the Catalan industrial ecosystem. The main scientific goal of the mission is to obtain a full sky photometric monitoring of the approximately 40 million brighter astrophysical sources down to magnitude 15, performing studies of transients, exoplanets, solar...
Glitches in neutron stars are sudden increases in their rotational frequency and are believed to originate from the stochastic unpinning of quantized vortices stored in their interior [1]. While previous studies explored this mechanism using externally imposed pinning potentials [2], dipolar atoms in the supersolid phase offer a distinct advantage: their intrinsic density modulation naturally...
The inflationary paradigm successfully explains the observed large-scale homogeneity and isotropy of the Universe, while also providing a mechanism for generating the seeds necessary for the formation of cosmic structures. In the simplest models, the nearly scale-invariant and almost Gaussian primordial perturbations arise from the amplification of quantum vacuum fluctuations of the scalar...
Cold neutral atoms constitute a highly controllable platform for studying complex quantum phenomena as well as for developing quantum technology. Some examples of their applications include atomic clocks, quantum computation and simulation, and the testing of fundamental physics. In recent years, the detection and manipulation of atoms at the individual level have pushed forward many...
The exploration of physics Beyond the Standard Model within nuclear physics is closely tied to the investigation of rare electroweak transitions. The most promising process correspond to the neutrinoless double-beta decay ($0\nu\beta\beta$) which is a transition in nuclei where two neutrons simultaneously transform into two protons, accompanied by the emission of only two electrons [1]. This...
Solar activity, such as flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), can accelerate protons, electrons and ions up to relativistic speeds causing Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) Events. These events can have a big role in the amount of radiation received by a spacecraft, astronaut missions or even high altitude flights. They can even afect Earth’s navigation systems or cause communication...
Symmetries, and their breaking, are a cornerstone of our understanding of particle physics. Consequently they have been probed intensively at colliders. However, if the breaking of a symmetry occurs at scales much larger than the energy reached in colliders, then it remains elusive. In this talk I will present an alternative method to study the breaking of particle physics symmetry by...
The Technological Unit of the ICCUB is currently providing several groups of ICCUB with services, such as instrumentation and software development, in order to support their contributions to international collaborations. Many developments on instrumentation are related to photosensor, microelectronics and space technology with key contributions in international projects such as LHCb, CTA,...
The ICCUB Advanced Technology Unit (ATU) is contributing to the software development and data processing of several projects of the Institute, including PLATO, PhotSat, LISA, and especially Gaia, as well as its proposed successor (GaiaNIR). In the first part of this talk, I will do the usual recap of software & data activities being carried out by the ATU team. Afterwards, I will focus on the...
As shown by Hawking and Penrose, black holes in general relativity are doomed to contain a singularity in their interior, where even the notion of space-time breaks down. This is no longer the case for regular black holes, for which no singularities appear. In this talk, I will explain how regular black holes arise naturally as exact solutions of theories of gravity including an infinite tower...
Understanding how molecular clouds collapse and disperse to form stars and planets is a key question in astronomy. In this talk, I will review several complementary lines of research aimed at uncovering the origin of young star clusters and OB associations in the solar neighborhood. I will discuss how the large number of substellar objects–brown dwarfs and free-floating planets–recently...
Tidal forces excite oscillatory modes of a neutron star in a binary system as the inspiral sweeps through the mode's resonant frequency. The excitation of the oscillatory modes imprints frequency-dependent signatures on the emitted gravitational waveform. These manifest as a sudden phase change in the waveform and an advance in the merger time of up to a millisecond or so.
In this talk we...
The formation of stars with masses greater than 8 times the mass of the Sun still remains unclear. Recently born massive stars are deeply embedded in the most crowded and densest regions of the interstellar medium of galaxies; thus, they are highly obscured to optical and even infrared wavelengths. Therefore, interferometric radio observations are crucial to shedding light on the formation...
Rare $b\to s \ell\ell$ transitions are strongly suppressed in the Standard Model (SM), making them sensitive to physics beyond the SM. Leptons from the different families have the same coupling to electroweak bosons in the SM, symmetry that is known as Lepton Flavour Universality (LFU). Precise measurements of LFU ratios in $b\to s \ell\ell$ decays provide, then, a very powerful null test of...
The standard model of cosmology is the best cosmological model that explains the nature and evolution of the Universe. Over the last decades, cosmological computer simulations have proven to be a very useful tool to test cosmological models such CDM and our Local Group is the perfect laboratory to confront these results with high precision observations. In this work, we performed cosmological...
