DAMP Physics, IITB

Instructor Name:  Vikram Rentala Course Type:  Honours / Elective Pre-requisites:  None Course Content:  Prof. Rentala deals with different topics in astrophysics every year. This year the course was on cosmology. The first half covered prerequisites, including basic astronomy techniques of measuring distances, natural units and a very low-level introduction to general relativity. The second half covered introductory topics in cosmology, like the composition of the universe, Einstein equations,  Hubble's Law, Friedmann Robertson Walker metric and redshifts. Books:  Modern Cosmology by Scott Dodelson Lectures:  Blackboard, no attendance requirements. Lectures are pitched at a non-physics background student and will be a repetition for any physics student who has taken a General Relativity course. Assignments:  35% Project. The project requires weekly graded submissions on a group website, in the form of LaTex reports. It is...

Contributed by: Sheetal Jain ISSAA stands for the Introductory Summer School in Astronomy and Astrophysics. It is held at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune. It takes place for 5 weeks in the months of May-June every even-numbered year. Only students completing their second year are eligible to apply (so there is a 50-50 chance for you to be able to join this school). Application The application usually opens in January and the deadline is in late February. It is an online form with you requiring to upload the following documents: Two-page resume   Statement of Purpose   1 recommender’s information (reference letter will be uploaded directly)   Transcript Allowances/Stipends Travel allowance is given/reimbursed, contingent to producing the railway ticket stub on arrival. Boarding and Lodging were also provided free of cost. Personal Notes/Advice It is an exciting prospect for those who wish to learn the bas...

The High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation(KEK), invited 10 sophomores from EP, to work on various projects, for a duration of 3 weeks, beginning 11 May. This cam under the Japanese government’s Sakura Science Program. This came under the KEK has two campuses - one in Tsukuba which is an electron-positron accelerator and the other in Tokai on the east coast. The Tokai campus goes by the name JPARC (Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex). As the name states, JPARC is a proton accelerator. We were invited to the Tsukuba campus which is about 70km from Tokyo. Our airfare was covered and we received a generous amount of money for day to day use. We were divided into 3 groups, with each group working under the supervision of a Professor. 1. Detection of CMB through Radio analysis of the sky spectrum Gurbir, Yashvi, and Viraj worked on this project. The CMB group at KEK had developed KUMoDES, a radio system spinoff of a cosmic microwave background detector, which uses t...