Tuesday, April 21, 2009

A serious misunderstanding..........:(

I had a serious misunderstanding in my knowledge of CP violation in the standard model sector as you might have noticed from my previous posts. What I was thinking is before electroweak symmetry breaking(EWSB) takes place there is no CP violations in the standard model sector. I thought since the standard model particles do not acquire any mass before EWSB hence there is no difference between mass eigenstates and flavour eigenstates. Hence there is no mixings in quark as well as leptonic sector.
I was attending a talk by Rajasekaran from IMSc, Chennai in the NuGoa'09 Conference (http://www.icts.res.in/program/AspectsOfNeutrinos) where he talked about the unification of quark mixing and neutrino mixings at high energy. I raised the doubt what is the meaning of mixings at very high energy say at the GUT scale. Then Prof Uma Sankar and Prof C S Aulakh pointed out that the mixing means mixing between Yukawa's , not between masses. So it does not matter whether EWSB takes place or not, the mixing is always there. Thanks to NuGoa conference, I could clear this major doubt among many others which I will write shortly.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

SERC Main School in THEP, 2009

Last week I came back from the SERC main school which was in IIT Guwahati. It was a very tiring train journey which was pretty obvious looking at the distance between Ahmedabad and Guwahati. But the school was really enjoyable. The following courses were taught in the School

1. Introduction to String theory by Sunil Mukhi
2. RHIC & LHC by Rajeev Bhalerao
3. Extra Dimension Physics by Prashanta Tripathy & Dileep Jatkar
4. Cosmology and Particle Physics by Subhendra Mohanty

The first course was truly amazing as you may have already guessed. It was like a dream come true after attending the lectures by Sunil Mukhi. He is also a part of blogosphere. You can have a look at his blog "Tantu-Jaal"(http://sunilmukhi.blogspot.com/). He started with very basic bosonic strings on the world-sheet and to every one's surprise could also reach AdS-CFT correspondence in his 8th lecture. Although he could not do much of compactification stuffs yet the course was really fruitfull for the non-experts in string theory like me. I at least got a decent feeling of what string theory is all about. The tutor was also awesome. He was Nemani Suryanarayana and did his PhD under Sunil. Both of them kept the classroom really vibrant and active.
The course on RHIC and LHC which I thought wud be the most boring wass surprisingly proved very fruitful as well as interesting. All the credit goes to Rajeev Bhalerao of course. He is one of the coolest prof I have ever seen. He covered a great detail of quark gluon plasma in his course. I really liked the contents.
The extra dimension course was partly good. I really liked the part taught by Dileep Jatkar. He is really cool. He was supposed the be the tutor there. But Gautam Bhattacharya could not come due to cancellation of his flight and Dileel on the spot prepared lectures for the remaining half of the course. That was really remarkable. Since he is a string theorist, he changed the course title from "Extra Dimension Physics" to "Flux Compactification" ...:P
The Cosmology and Particle Physics course was OK type. I got to know some informative things rather than learning something. The teacher was in a hurry to cover many things in just nine lectures and hence missed out many important and crucial steps in between. But I liked the tutor Kaushik Bhattacharya from IIT Kanpur. Whatever he did in the class, he made sure that nobody is losing track of what is goin on in the class. I liked the Baryogenesis part of that course, the sphaleron processes etc.
The non-academic part of my stay in Guwahati during the school was even more interesting. I used to take advantage of the bus services provided by the IIT Guwahati to the city everyday after the classes. I used to go to the city to visit my friends as well as relatives almost everyday and come back in the morning next day before the class starts. Although I could not visit my native place which is about 160 km away from the coty due to lack of time yet the stay in my relative's as well as friend's place was enjoyable.
After all going to SERC school is always fun. We make new friends, see some new places and most importantly learn some good stuffs. I would definitely be looking forward to the next SERC school which I hope will be in a nice place as well as will have some interesting courses.