About Me

Hi, I am Julian. This website is mostly dedicated to astrophotography, a long-standing passion of mine. I usually photograph comets, the Northern Lights, and deep-sky objects like the Milky Way from my home in the Dolomites. My night-sky pictures have been featured several times in the magazine Sterne und Weltraum and the book Astronomy Photographer of the Year: Collection 2.

My academic and professional background is in theoretical physics and finance. I also occasionally contribute to open-source software projects.

Outside of work, I am engaged in politics. Growing up in a multicultural and political environment in South Tyrol, and later living in Germany, the UK, and Italy, European integration has always been a practical reality for me. I recently organized campaigns for the European elections and remain active in regional and pan-European policy groups. My current focus areas are minority rights, digital sovereignty, and the Capital Markets Union.

        

Projects

WormAlgorithmBLBQ

Continuous-Time Quantum Monte Carlo Simulation of the Bilinear-Biquadratic Spin-1 Chain.

This is my master thesis project: A numerical study of Spin-1 models using Quantum Monte Carlo. We employ the Worm Algorithm, one of the many different flavours of Quantum Monte Carlo. This method is based on the path-integral representation of quantum mechanics. The thesis describes the extension of the technique to models with biquadratic interactions. This leads to a so-called sign-problem, which impacts the computational complexity. You can download the thesis or check out the GitHub repository.

Repository

thesis.pdf

The Maxima of CY Aquarii

Back in 2013 I created a website to calculte the times of Maxima for the short-period variable star CY Aquarii. To obtain the times of Maxima one needs to perform a heliocentric-time correction.

Website