DAMP Physics, IITB

Instructor Name Amitabha Nandi Course Type Honours/Elective (Core for DD) Course overview One Dimensional Flow, Bifurcations, Phase diagrams, Limit Cycles, Lorenz Equations, Chaotic Attractors, One Dimensional Maps, introduction to renormalization group theory Prerequisites No formal or informal prerequisites Credit distribution There was one quiz (15%), a midsem (30%) and an endsem (40%). Apart from that, there was a project, worth 15% of the grade. The topic could either be chosen by the student (after approval from the prof), or from a pool of suggested topics. Feedback on Lectures The lectures were extremely interesting, it really felt like the professor was giving his best. The lectures were blackboard based, so fast notetaking soon became the norm. Feedback on tutorials, assignments and exams The assignments were fairly tricky, towards the end. All the assignments were ungraded. Class notes (no printed material) was allowed in all the exams....

Temporal characterization of Attosecond pulses. Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK), Heidelberg, Germany. Work I joined the Quantum Dynamics and Control division at MPIK for 10 weeks for my summer internship. Ultrafast optics is useful in studying processes in nature which happen on a very small time scale. With the discovery of High Harmonic Generation it is possible to generate ultrashort Laser pulses with attosecond duration. But these pulses are of no use if they are not characterized before using them to observe other phenomenon (like observing Photoionization time delay). My work dealt with characterizing an attosecond time scale pulse in time domain so as to identify the intensity, phase variation and length (FWHM) of the pulse. For the first few weeks I read about algorithms used to characterize these pulses and discussed them with other PhD students in the group. I was assigned one particular PhD student whom I had already been corresponding with 2 months...

My search for a summer intern began in a pretty generic way: seeking professors working in the field of my interest, sending out probably a couple of hundred e-mails, and applying through some centralised programs. While I ended up working in something I didn’t originally want to, it was a good experience in retrospect. I worked in Cosmology at Kansas State University, USA. The task consisted of deriving constraints on parameters of a dynamical Dark Energy model which my professor had theorized. It required some basic understanding in Cosmology like Perturbation Theory, BAO and a teenie bit of Scalar Field Theory. Through most of it, I worked on reproducing some of the previous research in the area and I worked with some new data in the last 30 days. In spite of working in what was mainly data analysis, I was interested in doing HEP theory, and a month into my intern, I found out that my professor had completed his PhD in Semiclassical Quantisation of Gravity (yay!). Since my i...