DAMP Physics, IITB

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany Arkya Chatterjee Process of securing the intern: I contacted my prof via email and was funded via DAAD WISE scholarship, which I applied for separately. What was I working on? I worked in the area of soft condensed matter physics. To be more specific, my work involved developing a statistical field theoretical model for a phenomenon known as MIPS (motility-induced phase separation) observed in active colloids. There have been interesting phase transitions tuned by the supply of external energy that have been experimentally observed in colloids of this kind. One particular example is a colloid of so-called "Janus" particles. My advisor has been involved with one such experiment in the past, but the theory developed earlier was not able to account for certain aspects of the data observed in the experiment. My work was based on a new idea that my advisor recently came up with, which we

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, Canada. Hrishikesh Iyer Process of securing the intern: A new program has started as a collaboration between SFU and IITs from 2018. A mail for this was sent on GPO towards Feb end. I then contacted my professor and asked him to be my mentor for this initiative. After a month of form filling and SOP writing, I was selected.  What was I working on? My research group has developed some high performance piezoelectric vibration sensors. My job had two main components. The first was to test the sensors for their properties and several figures of merit like resonant frequencies, sensitivity, linearity etc. The other half involved sensor fusion. These sensors have two modes of vibration detection, each with its own bandwidth and sensitivity. My job was to develop readout electronics with the help of a postdoc for both these modes and combine these two outputs to purportedly get better noise performance and b

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany Arpan Ghosal Process of securing the intern: IAF What was I working on? Implementing Deep Learning to understand and track decays in Belle II experiment Workload: The workload is like any other job, 9-5 (flexible) every weekday. Understanding of preliminary particle physics and machine learning is important. Most of my work is using python (jupyter notebook) and the BASF2 software(Belle II's dataframework). I also use CLion. In python, apart from numpy and matplotlib, I use tensorflow and pandas to name a few. Courses that helped me: I had to take some online courses on Machine Learning (though I was never able to complete them, given to the immense pressure of IIT's core courses themselves). IIT's programming lab for python helped me a lot though. What did I learn during the internship? Cooking food (though charring is still common), a bit of Deutsch for day- to-

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 Hiroshima University, Japan Manu Srivastava Process of securing the intern: It was mostly apping. I came across this exchange program called ILDP which Hiroshima University has with many Indian universities. Had to choose a prof from the list provided and ask him if he was willing to accept me as an intern. Once I had his approval, I submitted the required documents to the Dean IR office and waited to see if I was selected. What was I working on? Mine is a theoretical internship on elementary particle physics. Workload: At present, I am about 2 weeks old in the internship. It has mostly been a study material suggested to get the basics (that you do not know already) to be prepared for some problem statement ahead. It is a 6-week intern and I have to be in the lab from 0900 to about 1800 with lunch in between. But it is not very strict. I can stroll around, take a break in between as I wish. Maybe this is the difference in a work intern

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 PMF (Faculty of Science), University of Zagreb, Croatia Aayush Khare Process of securing the intern: Apping. I mailed the professor after going through the work mentioned on the group's website. What was I working on? The group I was working with focuses on understanding the theoretical aspects of Microtubules, which are the most important component in the formation of the mitotic spindle that forms during cell division. They collaborate with an experimental group from the Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb. I was working on an ongoing project with one of the master's student in the group, on developing a theoretical model that tries to understand the various shapes of the microtubules observed experimentally in the mitotic spindle. The project holds important relevance in understanding the properties of the mitotic spindle and would possibly help in getting a better understanding behind the cell division process. Work

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bangalore Rahul Dandwate Process of securing the intern: They have a summer internship program, whose application deadline is in mid-January. The application requires a SOP., 2 recommendation letters, and resume. What was I working on? I was working on Conformal Field Theory (CFT). The big picture of my project is to understand the fluid behavior of CFTs. This project is motivated by the AdS/CFT correspondence, in this case it states that black hole in AdS (Anti-de Sitter) space are related to CFTs. The black holes in AdS space have fluid behavior, and hence we also expect this in CFTs. Workload: My work required some basic understanding of relativistic quantum field theory, quantum field theory, conformal field theory, and statistical mechanics. My work involved doing some calculation on Mathematica software. Courses that helped me: Quantum Mechanics (1,2,3), Statistical

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 University College London Shobhna Misra Hello, I am Shobhna Misra, currently pursuing my final year of BTech in EP. I did my intern at London Center for Nanotechnology, which is a facility jointly owned by University College London (UCL) and Imperial College London (ICL) in my summer. I was in the UCL campus. A snap of the UCL main quad dome- Don’t mind the cranes, they spoilt all my pics :( Now, something about how I got there. Well, I did try to start my Intern apping in December. I sent a few mails and did get some positive and some semi-positive replies. I was mainly apping in Elec (Power Elec and stuff, because I thought my work at Racing would help me secure an intern in that field…) But the hardware projects I got (well, because I am not really enthu about software) did not really catch my fancy. (Of course, I did receive some negative replies too, and I really owe it to the seniors and friend

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 California Institute of Technology Viraj Karambelkar Process of securing the intern: I applied through the Caltech SURF program, wherein you have to find a mentor beforehand, and then fill out a detailed application. Mentor finding is similar to regular apping, by sending emails to profs. The application requires you to submit a detailed project proposal that you come up with in consultation with your prof. Once you find a prof, there is a high chance of you being accepted. What was I working on? My project involved detection of variable stars in several galaxies from their infrared images. This was part of the SPIRITs ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01151 ) collaboration. The first step in my project was to perform photometry on the images of these galaxies. This means identifying all possible sources in the galaxies and how luminous each source is. Then, using the light curves of these sources, we found the periods at which they vary, and