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 ...

Instructor Name Raghunath Chelakkot Course Type Core for EP students (Half-sem) Course overview Principle of relativity, Lorentz transformation, concept of invariant interval, Minkowski spacetime, addition of relativistic velocities, energy-momentum 4-vector, conservation of energy and momentum, mass-energy equivalence, basics of tensor analysis, electromagnetic theory in terms of the field tensor. Prerequisites Formal: None; Informal: PH 108 (Maxwell's  equations) Credit distribution 1 quiz (15 marks) and 1 Midsem (35 marks); Total - 50 marks Feedback on Lectures No formal attendance policy, classes exclusively on blackboard. Feedback on tutorials, assignments and exams Exam problems were based largely on content covered in the lectures. Ungraded tutorials, mixed bag of easy and hard problems. Relevant References Spacetime physics by Wheeler and Taylor Introduction to STR by R. Resnick Mathematical Methods for Physicists by Arfken...

I spent my second year summer as a research intern at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in Prof. Sriram Ramaswamy’s group. My work was broadly in the area of theoretical non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Background Prior to this internship, I had been working on a project (under Prof. Amitabha Nandi) on the modelling of collective motion in self-propelled particle systems. So, in a way, I already had some exposure, albeit limited, to this relatively new field of research called ‘active matter’, and had developed quite a bit of interest in the work. This led me to apply to soft condensed matter physics groups around the world. The apping experience is something that only those who have done it can explain. After weeks of writing emails, and applying for scholarship programs, I ended up getting accepted for the Indian Science Academies’ summer research fellowship program, which provided funding for me to take up the position offered by my prof. The Group Th...

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...

My search for a summer intern began in a pretty generic way: seeking professors working in the field of my interest, sending out probably a couple of hundred e-mails, and applying through some centralised programs. While I ended up working in something I didn’t originally want to, it was a good experience in retrospect. I worked in Cosmology at Kansas State University, USA. The task consisted of deriving constraints on parameters of a dynamical Dark Energy model which my professor had theorized. It required some basic understanding in Cosmology like Perturbation Theory, BAO and a teenie bit of Scalar Field Theory. Through most of it, I worked on reproducing some of the previous research in the area and I worked with some new data in the last 30 days. In spite of working in what was mainly data analysis, I was interested in doing HEP theory, and a month into my intern, I found out that my professor had completed his PhD in Semiclassical Quantisation of Gravity (yay!). Since my i...

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...