Sperello di Serego Alighieri

A. Cosmology and high redshift
My main area of research is the study of the formation and evolution of galaxies, e.g. through detailed observations of the scaling relations of early-type galaxies, in particular the Fundamental Plane, at the highest possible redshifts (recent papers on my web site "http://www.arcetri.astro.it/~sperello" ).

B. Local Universe
I have a special interest in the study of the various phases of the interstellar medium of local early-type galaxies, for different galaxy masses and environment, and as a tracer of their evolution (recent papers on my web site "http://www.arcetri.astro.it/~sperello" ).

C. AGN
I have investigated the AGN unification, through observations of anisotropic ionization and scattering in high redshift radio galaxies, and in order to understand the relationship between galaxy activity and evolution (recent papers on my web site "http://www.arcetri.astro.it/~sperello" ).

D. Cosmological Birefringence
A particularly fascinating topic concerns astrophysical tests of fundamental physical principles. I am pursuing this with cosmological birefringence (CB), i.e. the rotation of the plane of polarization for light coming from distance sources. Such rotation is foreseen in case of Lorentz invariance violation, of CPT violation, of neutrino number asymmetry and of violation of the Einstein Equivalence Principle. The UV polarization of distant radio galaxies provides one of the most stringent tests of CB (recent papers on my web site "http://www.arcetri.astro.it/~sperello" ).