Title: The puzzling nature of hot exozodiacal dust: the case of Beta Pictoris

Abstract: Hot exozodiacal clouds are populations of dust grains residing in the inner regions of main-sequence stars at temperatures exceeding 1000K. It is a puzzling phenomena in exoplanetary science. On theoretical grounds, such dust should rapidly sublimate or be expelled by radiation pressure, yet interferometric observations continue to reveal its presence around a growing number of stars. The lack of a satisfying physical model, combined with the intrinsic difficulty of resolving emission just tens of milliarcseconds from the host star, makes every new high-quality dataset particularly valuable.
In this talk, I will begin with a general introduction to exozodiacal dust: its origin, physical properties, and the interferometric techniques used to detect it. I will then present new VLTI/MATISSE observations of Beta Pictoris, one of the most iconic debris disk systems and a prime target for studying the inner regions of a young planetary system. A central challenge in the analysis of interferometric data is the proper handling of correlated noise, and I will describe our approach to estimating correlation matrices for MATISSE data, which is critical for obtaining robust constraints on the dust properties. I will close with an outlook on the future of this field, discussing the prospects offered by nulling interferometry with VLTI/NOTT, and the broader implications of exozodiacal dust for the direct imaging of Earth-like planets with next-generation facilities such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory and the Extremely Large Telescope.