DAMP Physics, IITB

"Ask Me Anything!" with Prof. Archana Pai Prof. Archana Pai has been working with gravitational waves since 1996, when she started her PhD with the legendary Prof. Sanjeev Dhurandhar. At that time, in her words, “we were working as mathematicians - injecting compact coalescent binary signals and trying to detect them with our algorithms, essentially doing work ‘of the future’, which would be realized almost 20 years later.” Today, she is a member of the LIGO collaboration and has worked with the VIRGO collaboration, and is also a key member of the LIGO India effort. Her current research interests are statistical signal processing of gravitational wave signals, detection and astrophysics of gravitational waves from binary black holes with interferometric detectors and multi-messenger astronomy. What do you think will be the next big thing in your field? How do you plan to be a part of it? Observations of binary black hole merger events in gravitational wave w...

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany Arkya Chatterjee Process of securing the intern: I contacted my prof via email and was funded via DAAD WISE scholarship, which I applied for separately. What was I working on? I worked in the area of soft condensed matter physics. To be more specific, my work involved developing a statistical field theoretical model for a phenomenon known as MIPS (motility-induced phase separation) observed in active colloids. There have been interesting phase transitions tuned by the supply of external energy that have been experimentally observed in colloids of this kind. One particular example is a colloid of so-called "Janus" particles. My advisor has been involved with one such experiment in the past, but the theory developed earlier was not able to account for certain aspects of the data observed in the experiment. My work was based on a new idea that my advisor recently came up with, which we ...

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, Canada. Hrishikesh Iyer Process of securing the intern: A new program has started as a collaboration between SFU and IITs from 2018. A mail for this was sent on GPO towards Feb end. I then contacted my professor and asked him to be my mentor for this initiative. After a month of form filling and SOP writing, I was selected.  What was I working on? My research group has developed some high performance piezoelectric vibration sensors. My job had two main components. The first was to test the sensors for their properties and several figures of merit like resonant frequencies, sensitivity, linearity etc. The other half involved sensor fusion. These sensors have two modes of vibration detection, each with its own bandwidth and sensitivity. My job was to develop readout electronics with the help of a postdoc for both these modes and combine these two outputs to purportedly get better noise performa...

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany Arpan Ghosal Process of securing the intern: IAF What was I working on? Implementing Deep Learning to understand and track decays in Belle II experiment Workload: The workload is like any other job, 9-5 (flexible) every weekday. Understanding of preliminary particle physics and machine learning is important. Most of my work is using python (jupyter notebook) and the BASF2 software(Belle II's dataframework). I also use CLion. In python, apart from numpy and matplotlib, I use tensorflow and pandas to name a few. Courses that helped me: I had to take some online courses on Machine Learning (though I was never able to complete them, given to the immense pressure of IIT's core courses themselves). IIT's programming lab for python helped me a lot though. What did I learn during the internship? Cooking food (though charring is still common), a bit of Deutsch for day- to-...

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 Hiroshima University, Japan Manu Srivastava Process of securing the intern: It was mostly apping. I came across this exchange program called ILDP which Hiroshima University has with many Indian universities. Had to choose a prof from the list provided and ask him if he was willing to accept me as an intern. Once I had his approval, I submitted the required documents to the Dean IR office and waited to see if I was selected. What was I working on? Mine is a theoretical internship on elementary particle physics. Workload: At present, I am about 2 weeks old in the internship. It has mostly been a study material suggested to get the basics (that you do not know already) to be prepared for some problem statement ahead. It is a 6-week intern and I have to be in the lab from 0900 to about 1800 with lunch in between. But it is not very strict. I can stroll around, take a break in between as I wish. Maybe this is the difference in a work intern...

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 PMF (Faculty of Science), University of Zagreb, Croatia Aayush Khare Process of securing the intern: Apping. I mailed the professor after going through the work mentioned on the group's website. What was I working on? The group I was working with focuses on understanding the theoretical aspects of Microtubules, which are the most important component in the formation of the mitotic spindle that forms during cell division. They collaborate with an experimental group from the Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb. I was working on an ongoing project with one of the master's student in the group, on developing a theoretical model that tries to understand the various shapes of the microtubules observed experimentally in the mitotic spindle. The project holds important relevance in understanding the properties of the mitotic spindle and would possibly help in getting a better understanding behind the cell division process. Work...

Intern Experiences Summer 2018 International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bangalore Rahul Dandwate Process of securing the intern: They have a summer internship program, whose application deadline is in mid-January. The application requires a SOP., 2 recommendation letters, and resume. What was I working on? I was working on Conformal Field Theory (CFT). The big picture of my project is to understand the fluid behavior of CFTs. This project is motivated by the AdS/CFT correspondence, in this case it states that black hole in AdS (Anti-de Sitter) space are related to CFTs. The black holes in AdS space have fluid behavior, and hence we also expect this in CFTs. Workload: My work required some basic understanding of relativistic quantum field theory, quantum field theory, conformal field theory, and statistical mechanics. My work involved doing some calculation on Mathematica software. Courses that helped me: Quantum Mechanics (1,2,3), Statistical ...