Diego F. Torres

Diego F. Torres

Institut de Ciències de l'Espai

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

I was born in Buenos Aires, where I studied up to obtaining my doctoral degree in physics from the National University at La Plata, working on cosmology and astrophysics of extended gravitational theories. After several years in fellowships around the world, I moved to the Institute of Space Sciences to start a research group on high-energy astrophysics. My research focuses on compact objects and cosmic rays. I have received several scientific awards  including the Chinese Academy of Science Senior Visiting Professorship as well as its Presidential Fellowship, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award of the Humboldt Foundation of Germany, the Shakti Duggal Award on Cosmic Ray Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and several others. I became Director of the Institute of Space Sciences in March 2016.  

Research interests

The familiar sights of peacefully shining stars would be replaced by something extreme and variable should you look with gamma-ray eyes. You would be glancing at the most energetic phenomena known in astrophysics: accreting masses around black holes, pulsars, close binaries, regions of stellar formation, explosions of supernovae, and others. I develop theoretical models for these scenarios, and test them with observations using ground-based telescopes and satellites. My research focuses on compact objects and cosmic rays. My earlier research includes gravitation and cosmology; particularly, scalar-tensor theories and non-minimal couplings, scalar dark matter, boson stars, gravitational lensing, and wormholes. I published several papers on all these topics. My research group hosted 40+ scientists since its foundation in 2006. You can know more about all this, including links to my publications, from my own or the institute's webpage, https://sites.google.com/view/dft-research https://www.ice.csic.es/  

Selected publications

- Iniguez-Pascual D, Torres DF & Vigano D 2022, 'Inferring Pulsar Periods from Synchro-curvature Spectra', Astrophysical Journal, 933, 2, 234.

- Mestre E, Torres DF, Wilhelmi EO & Marti J 2022, 'Testing source confusion and identification capability in Cherenkov telescope array data', Monthly Notices Of The Royal Astronomical Society, 517, 3, 3550 - 3567.

- Weng SS, Qian L, Wang BJ et al. 2022, 'Radio pulsations from a neutron star within the gamma-ray binary LS I+61 degrees 303', Nature Astronomy, 6, 698-702.

- Garcia CR, Torres DF, Patruno A 2022, 'Visualizing the pulsar population using graph theory', Monthly Notices Of The Royal Astronomical Society, 515, 3, 3883 - 3897.

Selected research activities

-Director of the Institute of Space Sciences (>120 members this year)

-Scientific Director of the Maria de Maeztu Excellence Award of the Institute of Space Sciences.

-Member of Fermi-LAT and CTA collaborations.

-Published 7 international journal papers with few co-authors (usually my students) and have participated several more as a member of a collaboration. I have also published a chapter for a Springer book on pulsars. A selection is shown above.

-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of High Energy Astrophysics (Elsevier).

-Referee for mainstream astronomical journals in several occasions, as well as of projects and promotion of several countries.

-Co-created the visualization project 'The pulsar tree', http://www.pulsartree.ice.csic.es/pulsartree for studying the pulsar population in an innovative way, using graph theory. Our related paper was picked up as one of the high-energy picture of the week this year.