DAMP Physics, IITB

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...

Field: Experimental Particle Physics Over the period of June- July 2017, I worked under the guidance of Prof. Yoshitaka Kuno at Osaka University, on the readout and trigger electronics as part of the multinational COMET Collaboration. WORK   In particular, I worked on the readout for the Cylindrical Drift Chamber, implementing a Bonsai Boosted Decision Tree as a Level-I Trigger to decide which events could match our expected signal. This involved working with the Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA, which would form the basis for the final design. I implemented the softcore PicoBlaze microprocessor to interface with the PC, the FPGA and the Flash Module. Following this, I used an FPGA-optimized implementation of the Circle Hough Transform to examine the tracks left by the particles, and identify the circular paths which were of interest.   BACKGROUND The prerequisites were primarily a solid background in Digital Electronics, along with rudimentary High  Energy P...