IST-Physics Visitor Programme

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The IST – Physics Visitor Programme aims to support short-term stays by international professors and researchers, fostering the development of teaching and research activities in emerging scientific areas of high relevance and impact. The presence of these researchers exposes the academic community of the Department of Physics and IST to the latest scientific advances in Physics, Engineering Physics and related disciplines, while strengthening the DF’s standard of excellence in research and teaching.

The visits are intended to provide students across all study cycles with direct contact with cutting-edge research topics as well as with innovative pedagogical methodologies. The programme seeks to enrich the education of students in the three study cycles of the Department of Physics, while also benefiting students from other IST courses through the promotion of interdisciplinary, innovative and scientifically robust approaches. At the same time, it aims to create a niche of opportunities for the establishment of new collaborations and partnerships at both national and international levels.

Past visitors and activities:

  • June 2026: Roger Blandford (Standford University)
    Mini-course (3 lectures): Black Hole Gravity, Electrodynamics and Optics
    Dates: 5, 8 and 11 June 2026

    Brief course description: This mini-course will address how recent observations throughout the electromagnetic spectrum and beyond are affirming and transforming our view of how black holes power extraordinary cosmic sources. A summary of the relevant physical processes, emphasising general relativity, relativistic plasma physics and geometrical optics, will be presented and applied to recent and anticipated observations of stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. Special attention will be given to black holes associated with M87, SS433 and the Galactic Centre.

    ROGER BLANDFORD is the Luke Blossom Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and Director of the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Electrodynamics of Compact Sources. He is co-author, with Kip Thorne, of the textbook Modern Classical Physics. His research interests include the astrophysics of neutron stars and black holes, cosmic rays, cosmology, gravitational lensing and astrobiology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Physical Society, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. Between 2008 and 2010, he chaired the two-year National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He was awarded the 1998 Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the 2013 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the 2016 Crafoord Prize in Astronomy and the 2020 Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

  • February 2026: Visiting Professor Davide Gerosa (Univ. of Milano-Bicocca)
    Mini-course (1 lecture): Bayesian inference and stochastic sampling in (astro)physics
    Dates: 19 February 2026 (14:00 – 17:00, room V1.07)

    Brief course description: Extracting knowledge from data — the numbers we measure in physics — requires rigorous statistical inference. In this mini-course, we introduce the fundamentals of Bayesian reasoning and its role in modern scientific analysis. Key stochastic sampling methods will be explored, including Markov Chain Monte Carlo and, time permitting, nested sampling. The session concludes with a hands-on astrophysics example, guiding students through a complete inference workflow in practice.

    DAVIDE GEROSA completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2016. He then held a NASA-funded postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (USA) and later a faculty appointment at the University of Birmingham (UK). Since 2021, he has been an Associate Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy), where he leads a dynamic research group in gravitational-wave astronomy supported by the European Research Council. His core research interests include the dynamics of black-hole binaries, gravitational-wave data analysis, and related applications of artificial intelligence.

  • September 2025: Professor Visitante Jeff Steinhauer (Technion, Israel)
    Mini course (2 lectures):     Hawking radiation in an acoustic Black Hole
    Dates: 15 September (16h30 - 18h30, room V0.06) and 18 September (10h30 - 12h30, room V1.26)

    Brief course description: This two-session mini-course provides students with an intuitive view of Hawking radiation in a sonic black hole. Hawking radiation is a semiclassical phenomenon, and we will discuss both the classical and quantum aspects during the first session. We will also discuss the observations via the density-density correlation function. In the second session, students will run and modify the provided Python code to simulate emission of thermal Hawking radiation, analyze the resulting correlation functions, and compare their simulations with real experimental data. The activity concludes with a short writing exercise in which students will explain what they have learned about the correlation function. This hands-on course brings the abstract concept of Hawking radiation to the real world.

    JEFF STEINHAUER is a Full Professor of Physics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He leads the Atomic Physics Group, where he studies analogies between ultracold atomic systems and gravity. Steinhauer is best known for creating a sonic black hole in a Bose–Einstein condensate and for the first laboratory observation of spontaneous Hawking radiation, showing that emitted phonons have a thermal spectrum and are entangled. He earned his Ph.D. at UCLA on superfluid helium, held postdoctoral positions at the Weizmann Institute and MIT, and has since become a pioneer in analogue gravity experiments.