My ``Laurea'' thesis concerns the astrophysical consequences of the existence
of magnetic monopoles. I showed that with the only assumption that the
``engine'' inside a quasar is the monopole--antimonopole annihilation then the
only monopole which is in agreement with the observational properties of
quasars is that predicted by the standard model of symmetry breaking, with a
mass of 10
GeV [14].
I also studied the stability of neutron stars with respect to the phenomenon of neutron--antineutron oscillation predicted by Grand Unified Theories. In this respect I showed that, if the process occurs, only about 1% of the neutrons in a neutron star can ``oscillate''; therefore neutron stars are stable with respect to this process. I studied this phenomenon with Prof. Franco Buccella of the Physics Dept. of Naples [3].
During my permanence at the Physics Dept. in Ferrara I was also interested in problems connected with electromagnetic detectors of gravitational waves. I showed that for this class of detectors it is not possible to treat the problem in the ``traceless--transverse'' coordinate system but it is necessary to study the problem of interaction between gravitational radiation and electromagnetic detectors in the Fermi normal coordinate system, otherwise theoretical results are not directly comparable with experiments [10,2,1].