DAMP Physics, IITB

In my second year summer, I was selected to work with the String group over a period of 8 weeks at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR), Bangalore as one of the 20 students chosen from India as a part of the SN Bhatt Memorial Excellence Fellowship Program 2017. Application Process: I had applied only to the Indian institutes as I did not deem it necessary to go for abroad internships due to limited time and most importantly due to my extremely narrow research interest (theoretical + String oriented). Due to the naivety at the time, I applied to just 4 institutes in India. Fortunately, I got selected for the SN Bhatt program which has a very rigorous selection criteria. The Place: Bangalore has a very cool and pleasant climate, serving as a nice change from the humidity of Mumbai. The institute is located away from the hustle and bustle of city life. I used to take a shuttle from NCBS (my hostel) - about a half an hour drive. The campus is quite ...

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...