DAMP Physics, IITB

DAAD - Working Internships in Science and Engineering (WISE) Scholarship A brief informal review Contributed by: Basuhi Ravi (DAAD WISE Scholar, 2017) DAAD stands for Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (Translation: German Academic Exchange Service) and before you proceed further, we would like to request you to read this page thoroughly. DAAD offers several types of merit based grants for study and research in Germany to Indian students but the only one applicable to you as undergraduates would be the WISE scholarship. It is for students in their third year (if B.Techs) and third or fourth year (if DDs) who wish to work on a project at a public or state-recognised German University or Research Institute. Again, we defer from repeating the information succinctly put on their webpage. Instead, we focus on the couple of the points that are not discussed there, and we do so while adhering to the chronological order of things.  First, finding a project.  B...

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...

I worked as a Summer Research Intern à la Université du Luxembourg. My primary area of research was Non-Equilibrium Transport. Background Before applying for this position, I worked as a freelance developer and worked on computational astrophysics projects . In my fifth semester, I was applying for internship positions in two different areas. The first were game development companies in Mumbai and the US. Second, astronomy and astrophysics departments all around the world.  A lot of places in India might have provided me a better professional work exposure in some specific research areas . But going abroad for an internship is also a cultural experience, and deserves advantage of choice .  I did not have luck with my applications before I got the offer for Luxembourg. This was an application I filled through the PT cell. The group works in the area of mesoscopic physics. They are aligned towards theory and far from my primary interests. I sta...