PROJECTS

Current and past international projects I have been involved in include:

RadioForegroundsPlus: A Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, for which I serve as Project Manager. This project aims to improve the characterization of Galactic foreground emissions, in both polarization and total intensity, by exploiting multiple data sets from Planck (30-857 GHz), QUIJOTE (11, 13, 17, and 19 GHz), C-BASS (5 GHz), and S-PASS (2.3 GHz) surveys. The consortium brings together the CSIC (through IFCA), the IAC, the University of Oxford, SISSA, the CNRS (through IRAP and LPSC), and the University of Manchester.

Members of our team have also contributed to the release of new foreground models for the PySM3 simulation tool

ESA Voyage 2050: In response to the ESA call for long-term missions planning, I coordinated and co-led the Science White Paper "CMB Backlight", in which we describe the scientific advances that would be achieved in cosmology in the next decades with a large-class space mission that would probe the various interactions between the CMB light and the cosmic web.

Our aim is to use the CMB as a backlight to probe the total mass, gas, and stellar content of the entire observable

Universe by means of analyzing the spatial and spectral distortions imprinted on the CMB.

LiteBIRD: A CMB space mission dedicated to the search for primordial CMB B-modes, which has been selected by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on 21 May 2019 for a planned launch in the 2030s.

The LiteBIRD science goals and forecasts are described in this paper. As coordinator of the LiteBIRD SZ Working

Group, I led this LiteBIRD Collaboration paper on diffuse SZ science prospects with the LiteBIRD space mission.

Simons Observatory (SO): A ground-based CMB experiment to probe primordial CMB B-modes, SZ effects, neutrino masses, which already started sky observations.

The SO science goals and forecasts are described in this paper and this paper. The impact of Galactic dust foreground

complexity on the estimation of the tensor-to-scalar ratio with SO has been investigated in this paper.

CMB-S4: A ground-based CMB experimental project to probe primordial CMB B-modes, SZ effects, neutrino masses, planned for the 2030s. Unfortunately, on 9 July 2025, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) issued a statement that “DOE and NSF have jointly decided that they can no longer support the CMB-S4 Project.”

The CMB-S4 science goals and forecasts were described in this paper.

PICO: A Probe-class CMB space mission concept study commissioned by NASA for broad CMB science.

In this report, we have provided comprehensive forecasts on the science that would be achieved with PICO. In this

other paper, we have presented a comprehensive forecasting study on detecting the tensor-to-scalar ratio from

primordial gravitational waves with PICO, after foreground cleaning and CMB delensing, across a wide range of

foreground complexity scenarios.

CORE: A European CMB satellite concept proposed to ESA in 2017 for the detection of primordial CMB B-modes.

I was the coordinator of the Foregrounds Working Group for CORE. In this paper we have performed a comprehensive

study of the foregrounds and the component separation problem for the search for primordial CMB B-modes with

CORE.

Planck: ESA's space mission launched on May 2009 to measure the CMB temperature anisotropies through nine frequency bands ranging from 30 to 857 GHz. As a Planck Scientist I have worked on extracting and characterizing components of emission beyond the CMB only: Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effects from galaxy clusters, cosmic infrared background (CIB) from primordial background galaxies, Galactic dust foreground emission from the Milky Way.

I led a Planck Collaboration paper on extracting Galactic dust and CIB emissions. In another Planck paper I

produced the Planck thermal SZ all-sky map. An overview of the latest scientific results from Planck is presented in

this paper.

BINGO: A single-dish telescope for 21-cm hydrogen line intensity mapping, dedicated to the measurement of baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the radio wavelengths.

Here is a paper on a blind component separation method developed with my former PhD student Lucas Olivari for

21-cm line intensity mapping. First project papers from the BINGO collaboration have been released in 2021, e.g. the

QUIJOTE: An experiment consisting of two telescopes at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife, designed to measure the temperature and polarization of Galactic foregrounds — including synchrotron, anomalous microwave emission (AME), and free-free emission — at frequencies between 10 and 40 GHz.

This paper applies a non-parametric, semi-blind component separation method to QUIJOTE data to infer the

synchrotron spectral index, by reconstructing the zeroth- and first-order moments of the synchrotron emission and

estimating the spectral index via linear regression between the two moment maps.

BISOU: A balloon-borne Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS), launched into Phase A study in May 2024 following CNES approval. Its primary scientific goals are to detect CMB spectral distortions, in particular the ΛCDM y-type spectral distortion monopole, to measure the mean CMB temperature with enhanced precision, and to better constrain the cosmic infrared background. It also serves as a technology demonstrator and pathfinder for future space-borne missions in ESA's Voyage 2050 programme.

BISOU science goals and technology are described in this paper.