New Year's Eve!

Maintaining the tradition of spending new year's eve in the capital, I am "planning" to leave for New Delhi tomorrow. I am saying "planning" because there is still chances of this trip getting ruined. There are some strikes going on in Rajasthan through which my train is supposed to pass through. The Gujjar community there are protesting against the government by blocking rail and road traffic. Their demand is around 5% reservations in education, jobs etc. Anyone can imagine how ridiculous the way of their protest is. As far as their demand is concerned, I would say all the Indian citizens should get reservations so as to remove the existing bias as well as to rule out such stupid agitations in future ;) My train has been diverted from the usual route I guess, and hopefully I will be able to reach New Delhi before new years' eve. The dense fog around the capital is another problem hitting both rail and air traffic. I am still optimistic about reaching Delhi somehow. I have to leave for Calcutta also for a workshop in SINP from 4th Jan-8th Jan'2011.

Rajasthan 2010

I was in Jaipur for around one week attending a conference in LNMIIT as mentioned in the previous post. The city of Jaipur has got tremendous historical importance and the number of monuments in and around the city are still carrying the pride of Jaipur and the kings who ruled there. First of all the whole city is surrounded by hills and on top of the hills you can see various forts and huge walls. The ancient city of Jaipur was slightly away from the main city today and it was surrounded by huge walls. The fort of Amber was simply amazing. The beautiful ceilings inside reminded me of some of those in Vatican museum. It was great to see the Rajasthan Government taking all necessary steps to keep the monuments evergreen. Apart from the this grand fort, the Jalmahal, the Jaigarh fort, the Nahargarh fort, the Hawa mahal, the City Palace were also amazing. Jaipur don't look so good from the point of view of a modern city, but it has got so much historical monuments that no other city in India can probably beat Jaipur. And the interesting fact is that most of the cities in Rajasthan have such huge monuments which make Rajasthan a hot tourist spot in India.

Apart from historical monuments, Rajasthan is famous for wildlife also. Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary and Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve are pretty famous for that. Bharatpur is around 4 hours journey by bus from Jaipur. It's a small town, a bit dirty and unorganized. But the autowala took us to a nice place to stay. It was a part of a person's residence which he gives to tourists on rent. It was pretty close to the gate of the Keoladeo National Park (or Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary) . We went inside the sanctuary twice: we walked on the first day and took bikes for the second day. Although the sanctuary is spread over an area of 30 square kilometer, most of it were unavailable for tourists. Apparently a tiger came out from Ranthambhore national park and entered into some village from where people drove him off to Bharatpur. The authorities are yet to transfer that tiger from Bharatpur to some other national park. People said , it would be done within one week and the entire park will then be open for visitors. We saw a wide varieties of birds there mostly unfamiliar to me. The Siberian Cranes for which the park was very famous at one time, don't come nowadays. According to a guide there, since the Afghan war started, those birds stopped visiting the park since their route to India was over Afghanistan. Apart from birds, there were deers, antilope, wild lizards, jackal and lots of cows, bulls.

Ranthambhore national park is around 190 km from Bharatpur. And there is no good bus service between these two famous tourist destinations. We had to take some pathetic train to reach Sawai Madhopur (which is the district center and very close to Ranthambhore). Sawai Madhopur is again a very small town, but fact that the town has more number of hi-class hotels than shops surprised us a lot. We need to survey a lot to find a room which fits our budget. The Taj Group , the Oberoi group also have hotels over there. And due to high demands from lots of tourists, the prices of rooms were a bit high for Indian grad students ;) Anyway, we managed to find a small tent for us at 600 rupees per night. We took two safaris there, one in the afternoon and one in the morning. Although the afternoon safari went in vain (in the sense that we could not see any tiger), the morning safari made it possible. The guide is the second safari was a bit more experienced than the first one. He followed the warning calls from spotted deer and sambar deer and lead us to spot the tiger. The tiger quietly came and crossed our roads. We felt so lucky to see it in the very second safari, people don't see tiger there even after taking 4-5 safaris. The park is spread over an area of 392 square km and there are only around 30 tigers. So the probability of spotting a tiger in a 3-hour long safari is quite low. Apart from tiger, we saw many birds (which we already saw in Bharatpur), crocodiles, deers, antilope etc.

Area-wise Rajathan is the largest state in India, and of course it's not possible to cover everything within just few days. There are many more interesting places like Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Ajmer which we could not cover. Will have to plan some trip again to this awesome Indian state in near future :)

DAE Symposium Jaipur

DAE symposium 2010 was in Jaipur this time as I had mentioned earlier. It was held in a brand new institute called L N Mittal Institute of Information Technology (LNMIIT), around 17 km away from the main city. The institute campus was really cool, and the organizers also did a great job I believe with the arrangement of food, accommodations etc. There were two things I did not like about the campus: it is located in a very deserted place away from the city and the campus has too many flies which keep annoying you in the lecture halls as well as in the dining room. The symposium brought many old friends together, it was really nice for me to be in a conference where more than half of the participants are known. Most of them, I met in various other schools in the last few years. This symposium was also very exciting for me since it was the first time I gave a talk in a conference. Although I was a little bit nervous, but my talk went quite well. Each day of the conference was divided into two sessions: one for plenary talks and the other for parallel sessions. The invited speakers for plenary talks were well-known experts in their respective fields and it was really great listening to them, particularly the talks by Sandip Trivedi, A Joshipura and others. Anyway it was a great academic experience for me. The non-academic experiences of Jaipur will follow this post shortly ;-)

Symmetries at High Temperature!

When I read about the spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) in the simple scalar field theory, I was wondering many things. In SSB, what happens is that, the ground state of the scalar potential breaks the symmetry but the overall Lagrangian still preserves it. I was wondering if the reverse is possible and if yes, then how will we describe it. My curiosity was natural in the sense that we see more conserved symmetries at low energy like color (strong interaction), electromagnetism, baryon number, lepton number etc than spontaneously broken symmetries like electroweak symmetry. Although we know theories where Lepton number and Baryon number can be violated by the decay of very heavy particles, at GUT (Grand Unified Theory) scale for example, but we always take it for granted that the conserved gauge symmetries like color and electromagnetism at low energy are conserved at high energy as well. However, recently I found some papers which try to investigate such issues in details, the high energy behavior of symmetries. And it can be possible that finite temperature effects can:

1. Restores a symmetry (global or local) at high temperature which is broken at zero temperature and

2. Violates a symmetry (global or local) at high temperature which is preserved at zero temperatures.

Although the first effect of finite temperature is what most of us would naively expect (like in the case of SSB), but the second effect is something counter-intuitive as well unexpected. The second effect is known as Anti Restoration of symmetries at high temperatures. Langacker and Pi had shown in their work that the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetism which is perfectly conserved at zero temperature can be broken at very high temperatures provided your theory has sufficiently rich to account for that. Of course, with just the standard model field content, the second effect would be difficult to show. Although such anti-restoration at high temperatures wont be observed at present universe which is in a supercooled state, but such effects can have very important implications in cosmology. There might be multiple phase transition in the early universe because of this restoring and anti-restoring effects. There are models where the electroweak symmetry is broken at very high scale (~GUT scale for example), and as the Universe cools down, this symmetry gets restored after some critical temperatures and upon further cooling, it gets broken at the electroweak scale. This means that the standard model quarks and leptons were ultra-heavy at very early stage of the Universe which can have various implications. Although this field was very active in the eighties, I do not see anybody working on such models seriously nowadays except the models of supersymmetry breaking. But I find these ideas very interesting although they are kind of out-dated from current research trends point of view.

Delhi proved it once again!

Commonwealth games brought a vast difference to the capital city of India in terms of infrastructure, road, transport, quality of living etc. The successful completion of the games put a very good impression of the city at international level. But better roads, better way of transport do not always mean that the people are good and Delhi has proved it once again. Delhi has maintained the top position in the country probably for a long time in terms of crime against women. It is considered to be one of the most unsafe city for women in India. That clearly shows the typical mind-sent of common people towards women there. The day before yesterday there was another incident of gang-rape in the city. And this time also the victim was a BPO employee. No wonder that states like Haryana which is the worst sufferer of problems like female foeticide, honor killings, dowry and all neighbors the capital city. Until the people change their mindset, develop a little respect for women I doubt if such incidents can be stopped by strict law and order. Delhi has a mixed crowd, people from various parts of the country come there for various purposes. Out of them, may be the number of people coming from the seven north eastern states is the largest. And the crime against north eastern women is also largest. Apart from the most heinous act of rape, there are many incidents of racial abuse also. And north eastern people who look different from the people of rest of India fall prey to such racism very easily. People call them "Chinki", a disgusting word which I came to know of when I went to Delhi for the first time to pursue my BSc. When I introduced myself to couple of friends in the college and told them that I am from North East, their first reaction was how come I don't look like a chinki. People are so used to these words that they don't even think this could be a racist word. You can't make fun of people with their looks, color etc. But it's hard to convince people. Most of the time I give up when I try to convince anyone that these words make fun of people's look and we should not use them. But the same people reacted like anything when there was racial attack against Indians in various cities in Australia. Racism of any kind and anywhere is intolerable and I regret to say that Indians also suffer from it in their country. But it always goes out of notice to most of us, people think the abusive words are just for making fun. They are not only abusing the north eastern women, but at the same time they are making them look like alien to the rest of the people in the city. They feel lonely, insecure because of this and the most unfortunate ones become victims of the most heinous act of rape followed by murder sometimes. We can't always keep blaming the law and order situation, government, police for failing to provide safety to the women in a city. We, the people have to change and develop mutual respect towards our fellow human first.

CDM vs WDM

I have been a fan of CDM(Cold Dark Matter) since I learned about dark matter and and it's particle interpretation. By "Cold" it simply means non-relativistic at very early stage of the Universe ( = when it decoupled from the thermal equilibrium and got frozen whereas other standard model particles were still in equilibrium). Their mass can vary from a few GeV to TeV. People who love supersymmetry, would always bet for CDM since supersymmetric models naturally provide a CDM candidate without any ad-hoc assumptions. R-parity, a discrete symmetry which is ad-hoc in Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), but naturally arises in gauge theories where B-L is a part of the gauge symmetry (Left-Right Symmetric Models for example) makes the CDM perfectly stable. Thus it can satisfy both cosmological relic density constraints as well as structure formation bounds.

Although CDM has been taken most seriously among other Dark Matter interpretations in the last 2-3 decades, there is no experimental evidence yet which can confirm CDM over others. And this slightly discouraging fact demands us to be a little open minded. I recently read a paper by Manfred Lindner et al (Physical Review D 2010) where they have talked about Warm Dark Matter in Left-Right Models (LRSM). Warm means slightly lighter than CDM (mass of the order of say keV) and hence they could be relativistic for a long time. And the most natural candidate is sterile neutrino which naturally arise in LRSM as a part of the Right handed doublet. But since, they are considering non-SUSY models, the stability of sterile neutrino is not guaranteed and hence they have to fit the parameters in such a way that the life-time of the lightest sterile neutrino exceeds the age of the Universe. Although this does not look elegant like in SUSY models, but this is a good alternative and it does not cost you too much. You have far less free parameters compared to SUSY models and it will be easier to rule out or confirm such models in the experiments. In this paper, the authors are focusing more on how the keV scale sterile neutrino DM can satisfy the cosmological bounds as well as neutrino oscillation data. And they have shown it does, although with some undesirable features like one active neutrino becomes too light ( 9 orders of magnitude smaller than 1 eV, but still allowed from neutrino oscillation data).

Apart from cosmological and neutrino oscillation bounds which are of course the most crucial test for a dark matter candidate, there should be a way to actually observe it. The ongoing direct detection experimental results, I don't think we can fit with a keV sterile neutrino. The indirect detection experiments like Positron excess will be even harder to fit with such WDM candidate. But in any case these indirect detection experimental results have other astrophysical explanations and the various direct detection experiments don't agree with each other. Even if LHC gives clue about such keV sterile neutrino, we still wont be able to say if it is the true dark matter candidate or not. We still have to rely on direct detection experiments, provided all of them agree with each other. Anyway as G. Bertone commented in one of his recent review (to be published in Nature), we can not keep on proposing more and more experiments to search for dark matter endlessly, if we do not get some positive signal in coming few years, may be there is a need of paradigm shift and we need to look for alternative scenarios. The worst such alternative to me would the MOND theories. They look so ugly to me that I wont ever be able to believe Nature surrendered herself to them!

DAE Symposium 13-18th Dec'2010, Jaipur

Finally my trip to Jaipur next month is finalized. The abstract I submitted got accepted for an oral presentation. I will be presenting my paper with the PRL guys on D-parity breaking and TeV scale left-right symmetry (http://compactified.blogspot.com/2010/06/arxiv-number-2.html ) . This is going to be the first conference where I will be giving an oral presentation. I am a little scared but I already have enough of such presentations in IITB, so won't be a big deal I guess. Apart from the main results of the paper, I might include some other stuff also which could be a mere proposal at this stage since I have not completed those studies in details. I am looking forward to meeting couple of old friends as well as some well-known people in HEP from all over India. Apart from that Jaipur is one of the hottest (not in terms of temperature :P) tourist destinations in India and most importantly I have never been there except the train station through which my train passed through on the way to Delhi many times. If time permits I am planning to go to Ranthambore, Bharatpur also. These are very famous for wildlife (specially tigers and migratory birds). December will be very tight it seems as I am also planning to come to PRL, Ahmedabad after the conference for some work. I am not at all sure about new years eve party this time. I might not be able to celebrate it in Delhi like in last couple of years. Hope it happens once again. Keeping my fingers crossed right now.

Jai Ho Part II

India is great indeed. Recently you might have heard about the resignation of Maharashtra Chief minister Ashok Chavan amidst the controversies of his involvement in multi-crore Adarsh society housing scandals. Apparently the Maharashtra government allotted the land to the builders without proper approval from environmental ministry and beyond that, the flats which were meant for the family members of Kargil war heroes, the politicians and few corrupted defense top people shared among themselves. This became such a huge issue that the ruling party had to sack the chief minister and replace him with his successor Prithviraj Chavan. This is one story which is quite acceptable. But the same Congress government which sacked Maharashtra Chief minister is now defending another minister who is involved in so called 2G spectrum scam. The Adarsh society scam might have involved maximum of thousand crores, but this 2G scam involves an unbelievably huge 1.7 Lac Crores. Yes, I am talking about telecom minister A Raja. In terms of the public money involved in this scam, if Ashok Chavan deserved resignation, this guy should deserve public execution. I don't know where are those people now, who were shouting against the Commonwealth Games (CWG) saying the money (around 78 thousand crores if I am not mistaken) spent on the games could have been used for the cause of poor people. Although CWG was also hit by multi crore corruption, it was not as bad as this 2G scam. At least success of CWG could build a better image of India in the global stage. There should be huge public rage against such corrupted politicians like A Raja, and they should not just be sacked down from the current post, but should be given severe punishment.

The second part of Jai Ho is regarding construction of dams. India is very well known for throwing poor people out of their lands without giving enough compensation to construct dams. Narmada Bachao Andolan led by social activists Medha Patkar is one of the best example. Constructing dams, highways is no offense, provided the poor people who sacrifice their lands are given good enough compensation. In a country where one politician can lead a scam of 1 lac crores is it a big deal? Certainly not. India is currently building around 100 dams in the state of Arunachal Pradesh. The river Brahmaputra as well as most of its tributaries which flow across Arunachal come down to Assam, the neighboring state. And, you can imagine how these dams are going to change the eco-system in the entire state of Assam. The Government is saying dams are needed to control floods whereas people who have done study on it are saying the height of the dams are above the danger limit and if these dams start operating, it will bring terrible danger to the state of Assam. There is a huge public agitation going on across the state of Assam nowadays but it seems the state as well as the central government are completely indifferent to the concerns of the people of Assam. There was a committee composed of Professors from IIT Guwahati and Gauhati University to study the impact of dams in Arunachal on neighboring states like Assam. They gave a green signal to the dams based on their incomplete study, but according to Prof Shivaji Rao, the heights of the dams are still questionable http://www.downtoearth.org.in/node/1978 . There was also a news that the government gave a bribe of around 30 lacs to the professors in the report committee to give a green signal to the dams. Today I have seen another terrible news that now the central government is proposing 10 huge dams in the neighboring country Bhutan completely ignoring the outcomes of such dams in hill states on the plain regions of neighboring state Assam. This same government which is designing blue-print to destroy one state by constructing dams in another state, makes too much hue and cry when China attempts to build dams in Tibet on the river Brahmaputra as well as other small rivers which flow down to North East India. This does not make any sense at all to me. No matter who builds the dams, equal number of Indians will be affected by them. Anyway the way things happen in this country is beyond my imagination all the time. Jai Ho once again!

Maiden Trip to South India

I had my maiden trip to South India this weekend. The diwali vacation along with the weekend put me on an advantage to make such a trip. I went to the city of Bangalore, the capital of the Indian state Karnataka. I am sorry that I would stick to the older name of this city in my post, as changing names of cities don't make any sense to me at all. The new name of this city is perhaps Bengaluru if I am not wrong. Anyway, the trip to Bangalore from Bombay is 24 hour journey by train. The journey was very pleasant as the weather was cool all through. The train route was like a train route to a Hill station. There was no electric lines, the train had a diesel engine and it passed through forests, mountains etc. I really felt as if I am going home and not to Bangalore. There were hardly any famous or big stations on the way, the train was mostly passing through rural areas, forests, paddy fields etc. The altitude of most of the stations coming on the way were more than 500 meter from sea level and may be the that's the reason why the weather was pretty cool throughout. Even if there is rainfall, people don't feel the humidity. It was a different experience from Bombay, where rain means too much humidity and you sweat like hell.

The city of Bangalore was really nice, I found it quite clean and systematic compared to Bombay. I missed the Bombay local train there. The only mode of public transport was bus there. Although I did not have to take any bus, I could guess how difficult it would have been for me if I had to. The sign-boards in the shops, restaurants, buses were mostly in local language, neither in Hindi nor in English. I could just imagine how hard it would be for a new-comer to get adjust to the city life. I found it a bit weird, at least English should be used in the public notice boards if not Hindi. I did not have much time to explore the city, but these were my first sight experiences. I would love to go there once again, may be in March next year. This time I am thinking of visiting IISc for a week or so, so that getting leave from IITB will no longer be an issue. And at the same time will get an opportunity to explore Bangalore and its neighborhood (Mysore for example).

1010.6289

Even after losing enthusiasm after going through tedious peer review process, I finished the latest work (and first with my supervisor :P) and it has come on arXiv.org today with the reference number in the title of this post. It is about gauge coupling unification, fermion mass universality and type I seesaw dominance in supersymmetric left-right models with natural conservation of R-parity. The abelian B-L gauge symmetry is broken by Higgs triplet fields with B-L charge 2 and hence R-parity defined as

is conserved. The good thing about this is the natural presence of stable cold dark matter candidate in the model in terms of the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). Anyway our focus is not on this issue. We have found that at the cost of adding a few extra superfields, the minimal version of such models give rise to gauge coupling unification (at very high scale in agreement with proton decay constraints) as well fermion mass unification. The fermion mass unification relations in SO(10) grand unified model are

What we find is that fermion mass unification is achieved properly only in the case of third (and hence the heaviest) family of fermions whereas there is some discrepancy in the case of lighter fermions. However such issues can be handled with proper threshold corrections which can be found in the literature. Good thing is that such good characteristics of gauge coupling unification and fermion mass universality can be achieved in a left-right model only which is tremendously simpler than a GUT model like SO(10). But of course SO(10) has its own charm and can't be ignored. The point is that, the desert below the GUT symmetry breaking scale at very high scale is ruled by the effective supersymmetric left right model with some additional light superfields which are part of the SO(10) gauge structure but remained light somehow till the TeV scale (for example). Our approach was bottom up in this case, however it will be good to realize this in a top-down approach. That's the goal of next project.

Scientific Peer Review sucks!

My experience with Scientific Peer Review have been really bitter so far. I feel cheated most of the times by the referees. After the first review they ask you to correct something as well as include something. After you really include all of them and correct the earlier mistakes, if any and resubmit the manuscript, they come up with something else which they did not mention at all in the first review. And it keeps going like this. There are two disadvantages of it: your paper remain unpublished for a long time and you have to give lots of time after the corrections, modifications which you could have devoted for another work you are doing. Of course, you learn a lot as well in the process of constructive criticism. I think the referees should mention all the defects, shortcomings in the paper in the first review itself. From second review onwards they should limit themselves to their comments in first review and the author's response to them. Asking a complete different question (which sometimes looks more philosophical and have no connection to the subject matter of the paper) in the second review is cheating to me. It shows that the referee in fact does not really want the paper to be published in the journal, but somehow pretending to be diplomatic by not rejecting the paper at the first go. I would really appreciate if they directly reject the paper at the first go, without wasting my time in going through N number of revisions. Then at least I can move on from that specific journal to another one (may be with lower impact factor) and get it published within shorter time. I wish there were a better way to get our works recognized rather than going through the tedious process of peer review.

Aakrosh and Knock Out back to back!

Last night I watched the two recently released Bollywood movies Aakrosh and Knock Out back to back. As I was not feeling like doing anything after coming back from home, naturally watching any types of movies was the best idea to kill time. Fortunately these two movies did not disappoint me like typical Bollywood hit movies like Dabangg etc. These two movies are based on two very serious issues Indians must pay attention to in recent times: first the increasing honor killing incidents across the country (specially northern India) and the corruption in each and every department of our system. Aakrosh has shown the picture of rural India in a very realistic way. Killing each other in the name of caste, how the dalits have been suffering in those areas for a long time are shown in the movie. Ajay Devagan and Akshay Khanna have done a great job in the movie. Paresh Rawal, who is playing the role of a villain here, has also done appreciable job. I do not know the newspaper ratings for this movie, and I hardly care about ratings nowadays. They always give good ratings to crappy movies like Dabangg and almost overlook many good movies like Aakrosh. I will give this movie 4 star out of five. Talking about Knock Out, it tries to create an awareness among the Indians how a huge amount of public fund money is going every year to Swiss Bank accounts of various corrupted politicians as well as bureaucrats. Irrfan Khan and Snjay Dutt are in the leading role here. Both looked decent in their roles. However the plot of the movie is a direct copy of the Collin Farrel starer Phone Booth. Nevertheless, this movie deserves 3 star out of 5.

Back from an awesome home trip!

I have come back to my institute yesterday after an awesome trip to my home. This was one of my best home trip in the last nine years. Durga Puja as well as my birthday came together within the 9 days stay at home. The birthday was as special as the date 10.10.10 was, I missed the bumps although which I would have got in hostel. Although I was in Assam during previous Durga puja as well, this time it was much better in terms of crowd as well as the weather. The weather was really cool. The days were sunny and the nights were rainy, keeping the temperature around 25 degree Celsius. There was no need of using fan in the night. The rain was a bit too much on the day of Mahanabami in Guwahati, but in my place (which is 170 km east of Guwahati) was much better with very little rain in the morning. I went to couple of places nearby my hometown to enjoy the Puja crowd. Assam was looking much better in Autumn than in Spring, which might be because of less rain in Autumn. During spring, it rains so much that there is hardly anything to enjoy. But now as the rainfall has decreased (not stopped although), you can enjoy the green and yellow paddy fields, the blue hills with little white clouds hanging over them. At the end of my stay I was hardly feeling like coming back unlike in most of my previous visits. Usually I get bored and feel like coming back to Bombay, but this time it was really different. I am really missing the days I spent with my family. I feel like going back again. I might need 2-3 more days to come back to normal hostel life, presently I am feeling complete blank :-(

Jai Ho

After lots of uncertainties, fears and doubts, finally the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi is all set to take off today with a record-breaking number of participants. Things got changed drastically within one week in an unbelievable way. Just two weeks before, I really started doubting whether CWG will really happen or not. The Games village was not ready, many top athletes were withdrawing from the even due to security reasons or so, there were lots of allegations against the organizing committee of corruptions etc etc. But now there is nothing like this. All the participating countries are happy with the arrangements, Games villages seems to be ready as well and most importantly the security in the Delhi seems to be amazing with 1 lakh (0.1 million) security personnel on the streets of Delhi. Anyway, it surprises me whether things can change in a city like Delhi at such a rapid way or may be the media was exaggerating the things too much for their own benefit. I think that's surely the case. Before two weeks I have not seen any good sayings by the media about the games. All they published was about where ceiling collapsed, where bridge collapsed, how much money has been misused, which country is not participating etc etc. But as soon as the media got a much bigger issue to talk about, I mean the Ram Janmabhoomi issue, they have probably stopped attacking the CWG. Although I initially thought the Ram Janmabhoomi verdict came at a wrong time (thinking that it might produce some unrest in the country which can indirectly affect the games also), now it seems that it had one good side. The shifting media attention from CWG to the verdict perhaps made a better image of the games in the country. Now everybody seems to be supporting the even from the core of their hearts. Things were not as bad as media showed us probably, there were couple of good things also about the games preparations which were overlooked. Otherwise things can't change in such a way. Anyway, leaving aside the media exaggeration, the organizing committee as well as the government should also justify the amount of money being spent (where and how much). We can't let a huge amount of money to go into the pockets of some corrupted leaders which could have been used for the millions of starving poor people in the country.

I wish a grand success of this grand event and hope everything goes alright till the end of this mega event. Jai ho!

CP violation

The discrete symmetries known as Charge conjugation (C) and parity (P) plays a very important role in Particle physics. C interchanges a particle with its antiparticle whereas P changes the handedness by reversing the space-coordinates x --> -x. The Standard model of particle physics which describes the observed fundamental particles and their interactions very successfully, violates both of these two discrete symmetries maximally. It violates C in the sense that the particle spectra has left handed neutrino but not the left handed anti-neutrino. P is violated in the sense that only left handed fermions have charged weak interactions and not the right handed ones. The combined operation of these two discrete symmetries CP is also violated in the Standard Model due to the presence of a CP violating phase in the quark mixing matrix (CKM matrix). C and CP violations are two of the four necessary criteria (Shakarov's conditions) required to produce the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe. But the amount of CP violation in the quark sector of the Standard Model is too tiny to produce the large matter-antimatter asymmetry. This is one of the motivations to go beyond the Standard Model. This motivation got multiplied many times recently by the observed CP violation in Tevatron, Fermilab. One of it's detectors called DO has claimed to observe like-sign dimuon asymmetry in B meson decay which is 3.2 sigma away from the Standard Model predictions. Although this claim is yet to be confirmed, it has been taken very seriously across the world. I have already seen around ten papers which has explained this asymmetry by incorporating various new physics beyond the standard model. I am not sure whether this amount of CP violation (if confirmed to be correct) will be enough to produce the matter-antimatter asymmetry. If this suffices, then it will basically imply matter-antimatter asymmetry is generated at the TeV scale only. Since Tevatron is supposed to run till 2014 according to a recent proposal, we still have hope that it will verify this claim with much larger precision.

Judgment Day II

Finally Allahabad HC announced it's verdict one and half hour back bringing a resolution to the 60 year old dispute. The three member bench of HC, comprising justices SU Khan, Sudhir Agarwal and DV Sharma announced the verdict which should keep everyone in this country more or less happy. According to it the disputed site in Ayodhya be divided into three parts: one-third for Hindu Mahasabha, one-third for Sunni Waqf Board and one-third for the Nirmohi Akhara. I was expecting the HC will again ask for out of court settlement, but it's really nice to see the HC coming up with a more realistic verdict. I just wish this is the final verdict on this issue thereby closing this shameful chapter in the History of India forever. I wish every Indian will accept this and come out of the barriers of religion, caste and all to make India a better place to live in.

A Light Talk on Dark Matter

I gave a semi-popular talk on Dark Matter on Monday afternoon in the department. This talk was organized by Research Scholars Association (RSA), Physics Department and all the research scholars were invited. Although there are more than fifty research scholars in the department, only 15-20 turned up which was however not surprising. There is severe lack of enthusiasm among the people here and some might have been busy with some other important things. Anyway, it was good that not too many people turned up because we could not have the talk in the seminar room (which was booked for a class), but in a small classroom where there were not more than 25 seats. Coming to the main point, the talk I gave was semi popular since people from various working areas were supposed to come and I tried my best to make it as simple as possible. This was my first talk at a popular level and hence was very tough for me. Even after the talk, I was not much satisfied worrying that people might not have got any feeling of such a crucial problem of dark matter in the Universe. My talk went like this: (i) Summary of Standard Cosmology, (ii) Theoretical as well as experimental motivations for Dark Matter, (iii) Role of Dark Matter in the evolution of Large Scale Structure, (iv) Indirect Dark Matter detection experiments and (v) Direct Detection. Most of my slides had diagrams and words only and no equations ;-) Anyway it was a good experience for me to speak at a popular level. I am hopeful of preparing more such talks in future and keep this activity going on.

Judgment Day

There have been lots of anxieties among the people of India regarding the verdict of Supreme Court in the Babri demolition case. The mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed by Hindu activists two decades back which resulted in communal riots as well as many terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists. This is probably the most difficult case Supreme Court ever had to give judgment to. Initially Allahabad High Court ordered out of court settlement between the two groups Hindu and Muslim but both the groups rejected and appealed in the Supreme court. After lots of drama like shifting the Judgment day and all, finally the court gave Judgment today saying it has rejected the deferment of High Court verdict. I found the verdict very obvious and not surprising at all. In a country like India, where you do not have to make lots of effort to fuel a communal fight among two communities, a verdict on such a sensitive issue in favor of one community would be too much to bring chaos in all parts of the country. Already there is so much trouble, both internal as well as external and specially when the Commonwealth Games is around the corner, nobody would like to take the risk of such a disaster which will indirectly affect the games as well. Although today Supreme court said that on 30th September , Allahabad High Court will give verdict on the case, it looks very trivial. The High Court will definitely stick to its earlier verdict of out of court settlement. I am wondering if a mosque can be built at ground zero in New York, why can't we build something at Ayodhya which will create opportunities for all the communities and not biased towards just one. But it's not as straightforward actually. Even if the court orders to build a University or some trade center may be, it won't surprise me at all if people bring that down also. Indians are yet to come out of rigid religious boundaries. I do not know how to make people realize that there are many important things in this world to which we should pay attention to make world a better place to live in. Text book education seems helpless because you will find millions of Indians who are well-educated (in terms of their degrees) but suffers from religious brain-wash. I think this process will keep going maintaining the tradition of Indian Judiciary system. High Court will always stick to it's verdict, the communities will keep appealing in the Apex court which will again reject it and so on and on....

R-parity revisited!

In Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM), we generally assume the existence of an additional discrete symmetry called R-parity defined as

where B, L corresponds to baryon and lepton number respectively whereas s denotes spin. The advantage of this ad-hoc discrete symmetry is that it keeps all the B and L violating interactions away from the superpotential and the lightest super-particle(LSP) becomes stable which can be a good dark matter candidate provided it satisfies other criteria as well. There are some models where this discrete symmetry gets spontaneously broken and we loose some of its benefits. Although the most dangerous B violating terms (leading to proton decay) remain still away, but L violating terms come into the model as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking. These terms are not very dangerous if parametrically put under control. We can in fact see some signatures of these in ongoing experiments like Tevatron and LHC. But the LSP will no longer be stable in this case and we loose a dark matter candidate. But it is not a very serious problem that gravition (superpartner of graviton) is always there to satisfy the criteria of a good dark matter candidate in any R-parity violating model. Since gravity is very weak, gravitino can have a long life time even if R-parity is broken in the model. In fact such spontaneously broken R-parity models are much better than R-parity conserving MSSM. Initially what I used to assume that R-parity conserving models are good enough to explain the low energy phenomena as well as dark matter. But when I was trying to arrive at non-zero neutrino masses by adding right handed singlet neutrinos, R-parity gets explicitly violated at the superpotential level. Of course if we break R-parity explicitly at the superpotantial level, we can not keep the other B and L violating terms away from the superpotential. The only way to get rid of this problem is to fine tune the B-violating terms to make proton stable enough and keep L-violating terms so as to give rise to neutrino mass. This fine-tuning does not look elegant but we need to do this to explain another hierarchy problem in case of neutrino mass (why it is so small compared to other leptons and quarks). We could have realized spontaneously broken R-parity in MSSM (without right handed singlet neutrinos) by sneutrino (superpartner of left handed neutrino) vev. But that will break lepton number (a global symmetry) spontaneoysly and will give rise to Majoron which will couple to Z-boson and hence ruled out from precision measurement of Z-decay width. Thus R-parity conserving and spontaneous R-parity violating MSSM are not good enough to explain all the low energy phenomena. We need to consider either explicit R-parity violating MSSM (which needs lots of fine tuning in the R-parity breaking sector) or go beyond MSSM by enlarging the Higgs sector or gauge symmetry.

End of a busy week in an awesome way :)

I was pretty busy for last 2-3 weeks. I know the word busy sounds very unusual with me. But this exception happened this time due to accidental presence of my guide in the institute campus for almost one month. Just like accidental presence of some symmetries become useful for us in Physics, so did my guide's presence, in a academic sense of course. I could almost finish editing my draft with him. We sat together 3 times (twice in his home), and edited it. I have to go through it carefully now and mail it to him for his approval so that it can be uploaded in arXiv. Editing the draft was not a very heavy task, but I had to be busy waiting for him in the department the whole day ;) . Out of them some days were successful when I could meet him. Apart from these three days when we edited this draft, there were some other discussion sessions as well where other group members also came to discuss on another problem which we are doing right now on metastable vacua in supersymemtric theories. Anyway after being busy with editing the draft, giving talks, taking part in discussions and of course waiting for guide in the department finally yesterday I said bye to him for next three months ;-) Last night I went for a party thrown by one of my senior in one of the canteens in the campus itself. That canteen has the peculiarity that they arrange such party if informed earlier. They cook the items separately in a much much better way than they serve usually. Yesterday the food was amazing and reminded me of my home food. Another awesome thing was today's football match between the students of our department. After a gap of more than 2 years I played football, that too with bare foot. Although I played for just half an hour, it was really nice. It's difficult to play such a tough game after such a huge gap. Anyway, my busy days are over now, don't have to go to the department for next three months except the day when I have TA duty :)

What's going on in this country?

I usually try to keep myself indifferent to politics, media and all. But it seems too much now to keep myself so. I do not know if me as well as billion citizens of India are being fooled around by the stupid media here or is it really true that everything is going wrong across the country (except the stock exchange probably). The only good news I see nowadays is that the boom in stock exchange, creating new and new records. But these stock exchange records hardly make any difference to the poor in this country. Although economics is something I hardly understand, but I can definitely say that these so called economic boom is creating an absolutely wrong image of the country in the world as if we are really developing a lot. The poor-rich hierarchy is increasing like anything in this country and only the rich people's growth gets reflected in the sensex mirror. Anyway this is not a new issue in this country, it has been like this always and nobody pays much attention to it unless the sensex crashes. India has been facing so many internal problems recently starting with the Maoists who are as worse as terrorists but somehow our politicians are protecting them saying they are son of this country only. The second turmoil is the Commonwealth Games (CWG). Although it was a matter of proud when India won the bid to host this prestigious event, now I guess most of the citizens feel it to be shame now. Nothing is going well with this event which is scheduled to be started on 3rd October 2010. Looking at the present situation I seriously doubt if it is going to happen at all or not. After missing deadline many times, the whole organizing committee is found to have misused the funds allotted for the event. Not only that, the stadiums they prepared are not up to the mark and yesterday it came in news that the Accommodation at the Games village was too below international standards as complaints came from many foreign delegates. Today a foot bridge collapsed there adding one more feather to the CWG cap. The billions of people in the country have been made laughing stock in the world just because of some corrupted politicians and bureaucrats. While the government might be focusing on this CWG, on the other side Kashmir is boiling like never before. The ongoing protests there have crossed 100 days as well as 100 casualties so far and no agreement, understandings have been reached so far between the government and the separatists there. The hard-line separatists now want Kashmir committees in both India and Pakistan for some reason I do not understand. I seriously doubt whether those separatists want Kashmir to be an Independent country or a province in Pakistan or China may be. This unrest in Kashmir has also brought a serious concern of safety in the country specially in the CWG event in Delhi. I hope everything will remain alright at least till the end of this event.

Competition vs Collaboration

There was a recent discussion in the high energy physics community whether to run Tevatron at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois. It is said that many top scientists including Nobel Laurette are suggesting an extension of another three years after the proposed shutdown in 2011. People are saying that Tevatron is not dead yet and it still has a great potential to search the Higgs boson. I agree upto this point. But I found some comments like this also : "Fermilab researchers have a chance to see the Higgs boson first because the more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, is running years behind schedule and is going to be shut for around 15 months in 2012 for some repair work". I do not understand the meaning of competing with the CERN. After all, LHC is an international collaboration and the US is also contributing to it. Running Tevatron for another three years is a good thing provided it has a potential to discover some new physics beyond the standard model, like it has recently seen some dimuon asymmetry which is 3.2 sigma away from standard model predictions. But the motive to run the Tevatron should not be just to compete with CERN. We should compete with Nature to unfold her secrets, (no matter how hard She tries to hide them) rather than spending billion dollars just to compete amongst ourselves specially during a time when there is a crisis in the global economy. We should also save some money to build the proposed ILC (International Linear Collider) which is supposed to confirm whatever LHC finds :)

Metastable Vacua!

Yesterday I gave a talk on Supersymmetry(SUSY) breaking in a metastable vacua in the department. It was kind of discussion session which I started by giving a summary on this topic, specially the famous paper hep-th/0602239 (ISS) which has currently 345 citations. Metastable vacua is basically the ground state of a theory which has finite lifetime. Generally we encounter ground state which is perfectly stable and has infinite lifetime. But there are some theories where there can be multiple vacua which corresponds to different ground state energies. Suppose one minimum corresponds to ground state energy e and another corresponds to E. Now the tunneling between these two vacua will be negligible if

Thus although the vacuum with ground state energy E is not the true vacuum, yet it can be very stable and can have a life time same as the age of the Universe.

In the theories of dynamical SUSY breaking, SUSY is broken at the tree level, and it is restored non-perturbatively at high energy. Thus there are two vacua, one corresponds to the one with SUSY breaking and the other SUSY preserving. Since SUSY preserving vacua has ground state energy zero, this means our Universe (where SUSY is broken) is in a metastable state now. Just imagine what will happen if the Universe suddenly decays to the true vacuum tomorrow ;-). We will meet our superpartner friends then. Anyway the ISS paper which I mentioned above talks about these issues. They start with a SUSY QCD(Quantum Chromodynamics) based on a general gauge group

with flavors of quarks. This theory is asymptotically free (which means the couplings become strong at low energy and quarks become almost free at high energy) like our usual QCD. This theory is strongly coupled at low energy which makes the low energy computations go out of control. But the good thing is that this theory is dual to theory with singlets and chiral fields which transform as fundamental/anti-fundamental representation under this new gauge group. This is known as Seiberg's electromagnetic duality . The good thing is that for smaller than this theory is IR free which means that it is weakly coupled at low energy and strongly coupled at high energy. Thus we can do all the low energy computations with full control unlike in the gauge theory. This dual theory is found to break SUSY at tree level and preserve SUSY non-perturbatively after integrating out the massive chiral fields. These two vacua are however widely separated in field space and hence there is no danger of one going into another. The SUSY breaking vacuum is close to the origin whereas the SUSY preserving one is far away in field space. Since the SUSY preserving vacuum has zero vacuum energy, the SUSY breaking vacuum is not the true vacuum since it has non-zero vacuum energy. This means that the SUSY breaking vacuum is a metastable one whose life time can be parametrically made as long as the age of the Universe. This duality works for

and it is easy to see that this does not hold in case of minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) for which . But no matter how close this framework is to the reality, it is very impressive from a theorist's point of view and that's the reason I guess why people all over the world is taking this model so seriously. It would be worth studying in fact, how this theoretical framework can be used to arrive at the MSSM with TeV scale SUSY breaking.

কোনে কৈছে মই কবিতা লিখিছো বুলি......

তোমাক হেৰুৱাই মই সুখী বুলি নাভাবিবা

থিক হেৰুওৱা নহয়,
তোমাক মোৰ পৰা আঁতৰাই ৰখা বুলি ক’লে বেছি ভাল শুনি
কিন্তু মই জানো সেইটো বিচাৰিছিলো ?
তুমি তো মোৰ ভাল পোৱাক কেতিয়াও সন্দেহ কৰা নাছিলা
তেন্তে তোমাক এই শাস্তি মই কিয় দিছো ?
এই কথা হয়তো তোমাক মই বুজাব নোৱাৰিম
জীবনত যে সকলো সিদ্ধান্ত নিজে ল’ব নোৱাৰি
সেইয়া বুজাত যেন বহুত পলম কৰি দিলো মই
তুমি মোক ক্ষমা ক’ৰিলেও হয়তো
তোমাৰ ভাল পোৱাই নক’ৰিব
আচলতে ক্ষমাৰ যোগ্যই নহয় মই
তুমি কোৱা তুমিও মোৰ লগত যাত্ৰা কৰিবা
এই নিঃসঙ্গতা নামৰ নাওখনত
হয়তো এয়াই মোৰ শাস্তি
প্ৰতিটো মুহূৰ্ত্তই যেন মোক সোঁৱৰাই থাকিব
মই তোমাৰ প্ৰতি কৰা অন্যায়ৰ কথা
তুমি আগবাঢ়ি যোৱা, মোলৈ বাট নাচাবা
মই কৰা ভুলৰ শাস্তি নিজক নিদিবা
বিচাৰি লোৱা এটি নতুন জীবন, সুখী হোৱা


(Thanks to http://www.xobdo.org/ for providing an opportunity to type in my mother-tongue Assamese)

The Sun is showing its face after a long time!

After a long time, the sun has shown it's face in Bombay. After the monsoon arrived in June, there was hardly any sunny weather here. It rained a lot this time, highest rainfall in last seven years. Although there are clouds in the sky today, but still the sun is showing up in between. I was never so desperate to see the sun in my life like this time. I always used to love rainy weather as well as winter, may be because when the sun comes up it becomes unbearably hot in most parts of India. But may be this year, the rain was too much for me. Gloomy, cloudy weather for such a long span of time is really depressive as well as unhealthy. I can imagine now why people in Europe and other parts are always so excited about sunny weather. The winter there would even be worse that the monsoon in Bombay I guess specially in northern European nations. I am wondering what would happen to me if I do not see the sun for like six months or so....:-o

Non-Academic Leave!

I am planning to take Non-Academic Leave for around ten days next month. It has been a long time I have not taken this type of leave ;) Whatever leave I have taken this year are all part of my academic leave which does not have any upper bound. But personal leave can be maximum of thirty days in a year and they are not cumulative :( Thus it is better if I make maximum use of it every year. I am planning to go home next month during the Durga Puja vacation. I was not planning this although. I wanted to go home in December, but that has become unlikely since I might have to go to Jaipur for DAE Symposium (http://heps.lnmiit.ac.in/). So better I should go next month itself to get the Durga Puja festival as a bonus. I do not have much work load also except the two papers which I am trying to finish. The only thing I am worrying is the TA duty in that week. I need to find some guy who can take the responsibility of that for the particular week. I do not know exactly what will happen if I do not find a substitute to do the TA duty for that week and go home. May be the department will cut my stripends, which I won't mind much anyway :)

It Feels Good!

After more than one year gap, I finally met my supervisor :-) It feels great indeed, and he could recognize me as well ;) Actually this meeting was supposed to happen couple of months later, but he had to come to the institute for some emergency reasons and we end up meeting unexpectedly. For the last one year we are working on a problem, written 2-3 versions of a manuscript but still have not been able to finalize it. It's really difficult (at least for a beginner like me) to do work by just communicating through email. Let's see if something can be done in this direction during his one month stay here although I am not much hopeful about it. In the meantime I am trying to finish some of my own work which might lead to a publication if the results are correct which I have to re-check :)

Loss of perturbativity!

Electroweak Precision data still keeps room available to include one more chiral family into the standard model provided the quark and lepton masses are greater than some lower bound. The lower bound for the fourth generation quarks are around 200 GeV whereas for charged lepton it is around 100 GeV. The fourth generation neutrino should be more massive than

so as not to contribute to Z boson decay width which is experimentally measured very accurately and is in good agreement with three family Standard Model. Now in the standard model we have top quark yukawa coupling almost equal to 1 so as to account for its mass . Thus if we want to account for fourth generation quark masses, we have to take the corresponding yukawas large -->> Loss of perturbativity? In MSSM, the problem gets even more complicated. We have two Higgs doublet in this case, with vacuum expectation values and and their rations are denoted by . It turns out that with low value of ( close to unity) we can keep the yukawas perturbative at the electroweak scale and at the same time give rise to fourth generation quark and charged lepton masses above the experimental lower bound. However such a low value of will make the lightest Higgs boson mass at tree level very small and we have to check if loop corrections (including fourth generation) can make its mass greater than the LEP lower bound 114.5 GeV. Now suppose after taking loop corrections, we are getting Higgs mass greater than this limit as well as fourth generation masses are also above the lower bounds while keeping the yukawa perturbative. The problem is not yet solved, because when we evolve those yukawas under renormalization group, at every stage upto the grand unification scale (GUT) (assuming there is no new physics between MSSM and the GUT scale). But it turns out that (although I haven't checked it yet but there are works related to this in the literature)yukawas become non-perturbative near the TeV scale if there is not new physics between MSSM and GUT scales. People then incorporate new physics at the TeV scale which keeps the yukawas perturbative till the GUT scale. So far I have seen only one paper arXiv:0806.2064 where they have talked about adding some new vector like matter particles at the TeV scale. I personally find these vector like matter particles quite ad-hoc although they are serving this particular purpose here, I don't know how to incorporate them within the framework of some higher theories like Grand Unified Theories. But vector fields contribute differently to the beta function compared to chiral fields. Their contribution comes with opposite signs and may be that could be the reason why vector particles help the yukawas to slow down their running to keep them perturbative till the GUT scale. Anyway these are theoretical issues, but experimentally also fourth generation might have interesting signatures from colliders to dark matter search experiments as well. Will update about those issues next time :)

Light Higgs!

We all know that in minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM), we naturally arrive at a light Higgs whose mass is of the order of Z boson mass. Its only after taking loop corrections into account we can make it as heavy as the LEP limit which is around 114.5 GeV. The question of light Higgs bosons always puzzled me in Supersymmetric Left-Right(SUSYLR) models which forced me to work out the Higgs boson mass in MSSM at least. Only after the calculations I got the idea how things become so different when we add supersymmetry to the standard model. In standard model we have a Higgs potential involving the mass term and the quartic coupling term. However in MSSM we have only a bi-linear term in the superpotential which can give rise to the mass term in the scalar potential. But the quartic coupling term can come from only the D-terms. Hence the quartic coupling parameter in this case is a combination of the gauge coupling constants, not a free parameter like in the case of standard model. We have no choice in MSSM to fine tune these couplings to make the Higgs mass heavy. In richer theories like SUSYLR, things become more complicated.

Suppose we have triplet Higgs fields $ \triangle_L, \triangle_R $ in addition to the doublet Higgs fields which gives masses to the fermions. These triplets are added to break the SUSYLR gauge symmetry $ SU(2)_L \times SU(2)_R \times U(1)_{B-L} $ down to the MSSM gauge symmetry $ SU(2)_L \times U(1)_Y $. Here L, R denotes left handed and right handed respectively, B, L and Y denote baryon number, lepton number and weak hypercharges respectively. These triplet fields have B-L charge $\pm 2$ and hence we need to add two more such fields in SUSYLR model to cancel the anomalies. Now the common intuition will say that these triplet fields will acquire masses of the order of $ SU(2)_R $ symmetry breaking scales because these fields are introduced for this symmetry breaking. This intuition is sometimes called survival principle which I mentioned in one of my previous posts. Now if we actually calculate the mass spectra, we see that this principle is not always true. For example, consider these triplets. Gauge symmetry does not allow us to write the bi linear or trilinear terms of the same triplet field in the superpotential. We can however write bi linear mass terms involving one triplet and another of opposite B-L charge. Now when we write the scalar potential we only have the mass terms and no quartic terms. And unlike in MSSM where we could find some quartic terms coming from the D-terms, here we can't have it because that will break supersymmetry. We are breaking SUSYLR to MSSM which means that supersymmetry is not broken, but only the gauge symmetry is broken. Hence the D-term scalar potential will decouple at this stage. Thus we need to incorporate non-renormalizable quartic terms which will give rise to non-zero mass of these Higgs fields. The masses come out to be light naturally since these non-renormalizable terms are highly suppressed by the Planck scale or GUT sale. I think, if the $ SU(2)_R $ breaking scale is around the supersymmetry breaking scale, we can have quartic couplings. But in this case also existence of light Higgs will still be true. I was reading some papers by Mohapatra et al. where they describe the scenario in terms of some enhanced global symmetry in the superpotenal in the absence of some terms, then they break this approximate symmetry resulting in pseudo-goldstone bosons which are not exactly mass-less but have light masses. I am still not confident about those enhanced global symmetries and all, but the existence of light Higgs in such models is something unavoidable with minimal field content. Such light particles creates problems in gauge coupling unification since they keep contributing to the evolution till the electroweak scale which forces the couplings to reach Landau pole (non-perturbative) much before the GUT/Planck scale.

APS 2010

I am done with my second Annual Progress Seminar (APS) today. And traditionally, it was done without the presence of my PhD supervisor. Two examiners were there, may be the same will happen in my PhD defense as well ;) I mainly talked about the paper which I put in arXiv in June. (http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.2245). In the annual progress report also I just pasted the whole paper, nothing else. The seminar was cool, fortunately I was not attacked with too many questions but by some basic doubts which the examiners had. At the end I talked about some of the work which I have been doing recently. The paper I mentioned above is yet not published, the referee's comments have come, and I am done with almost all the suggested corrections and modifications. After I get green signal from my collaborators, I will probably resubmit it as soon as possible. Hope it gets published soon, I am dying to get one published paper so that I can apply for various conferences :)

Another Independence Day, 15th Aug'2010

So here comes another Independence day for us. Sitting inside my room also I can see the "virtual" celebrations through forwarded mails, social networking sites like facebook and all. Someone has put a tri-color in the profile pic or someone has uploaded a video which shows India's economy growth rate, number of Indians in NASA, India as largest democracy, India has x number of supercomputers, India has y number of CEO's in MNC's and so on. I get so much pissed off with such videos. I do not understand what these videos are meant for, and why these videos come at the time of Independence day or Republic day. I do not think people will forget the importance of the day if such unnecessary videos are not made. I am an Indian and I love my country and I do not need any reason to love my country. Even if my country has none of the "plus points" which these videos show, I will continue to love and respect my country. The worst thing about this videos are that they do not show everything. They show less than one percent of India just to win people's hearts and to gain popularity. They don't show the situations of millions of people under poverty line, common people who get killed by extremists, naxalites or security forces in various parts of the country. They don't show the civilian human rights violations in many parts of the so called "largest democracy". They don't show how much pride/shame India has earned hosting the Commonwealth Games which has been severely hit by large scale corruptions delaying all the preparations. There are many more things to be shown to the people about this country. If someone makes video showing India as a whole, he or she should include all such things. But they always put 10 bright things in the video and neglect thousands of dark sides of the country. India will change only when there will be enough awareness among the common people. The media, social networking sites should be used to increase the awareness, not to flatter the public to gain some cheap popularity. Happy Independence day to all, Jai Hind!

Things getting worse!

Things in the IITB campus getting worse and worse nowadays. We already had lots of problems running the common mess of Hostel 12 and Hostel 13. The caterer called Aditya Caterers was thrown out last year due to some stupid reasons. After that they hired another caterer which also gave up after six months. Its not an easy task to run a mess for around 1200 people. Now they have built up one brand new hostel and one new wing of Hostel 12. And to add to the woes of old H-13 and H-12 mates, they have included all these new people in the same mess which was already in trouble. Now there are 2000 people eating in the same mess. The food quality, hygiene, maintenance everything went down sharply. I can not understand why they could not start a new mess for the Hostel 14. I doubt how long this new caterer will be able to run this mess. One more disgusting thing which has happened is that IIT is charging 800 rupees per year from all students for the stupid facility of the transport system inside the campus no matter they use it or not. Many students have their own bi-cycles and many prefer to walk from hostels to the department. In such a case why a student will pay money for a facility which he or she is not going to use at all. I do not understand who decides these things, in a democratic country things should happen in a democratic way. But here only the big boss takes decisions and are imposed on thousand poor students forcefully.

Venice trip!

I managed to make a trip to Venice while coming back home from Trieste. My flight was on Saturday morning and I came from Trieste at 2 PM on Friday. Three of my friends also came with me. We reached Venice at around 5 PM. The weather was thankfully very shiny although it was raining like anything on Thursday. Venice was really different from other cities. The whole transport system in the city is based on boats. We did not take any boat ride although they are not very expensive compared to the famous Gondola. The city is pretty small like other Italian cities and we managed to walk around for sight seeing. We walked from the station to the piazza San Marco. That was the most famous place in the city I guess, there were lots of people there and some live concerts were also going on. It was a lovely atmosphere there. We stayed in the city till 10 pm and then took a bus to the airport. Venice airport is terribly small with hardly any shops inside. I could not find a shop to buy some food also, forget about my plans to buy chocolates and wine from there. We spent the whole night in the airport and then took flights at 7 am.

Italian Experiences!

During the ICTP summer school, we had a weekend in between and the plan was to make full use of it. Although there was a news of train strike during the weekend, fortunately it did not happen and we could stick to our earlier plans of visiting some places. Just after the lectures on Friday were over, we had dinner and then left to Trieste Central Railway station. By the time we reached, the ticket counter was closed and the only option left was the buy tickets from the machine. I got my ticket without any difficulty from the machine. But when my three other friends tried to buy their tickets together, somehow the machine did not deliver them and 130 euro got stuck inside. We went to the customer care and the guy (in little English and more Italian) told us that we have to fill up a form which he would sign and then show it to the ticket counter on weekdays (during work-hours). Losing 130 euro just before going out for a long trip was damn frustrating. But still we did not change our plans. My friends bought their tickets individually and we left for Rome.

As expected, the train was crowded and we could not have enough sleep in the train. The ticket inspectors kept coming one after another to check the same damn ticket and waking us up. I probably slept for 2 hours just before reaching Rome and that proved to be good enough for me. Just after getting down at the Rome station we bought a day ticket for the metro and went to locate our hotel. After asking couple of people on the streets, we finally found the hotel. The guy at the reception (to our surprise) was a Bangladeshi. He offered us free breakfast, although we could not check in at that time and he asked us to come at 2 PM. We then left for St. Peter's Basilica by metro. This place is damn crowded specially on weekends and fortunately we booked the entry tickets online and hence did not have to stand in those ques. We went to Vatican Museum, Vatican Church and finished everything there by noon. That was remarkable indeed. After that we went to see the Colosseum. There also we applied a trick (which was suggested by one Indian who is a ICTP regular associate). Instead of waiting in the long que in Colosseum to buy the ticket, we went to Roman Forum where there was hardly any que and bought the combined ticket to see both the forum and Colosseum. It took around 2-3 hours to see everything there. We felt tired indeed after that. We took rest in the hotel for sometime and came out in the evening to see some other places like Fontana di Trevi. We went to the Colosseum again to see the night view, it was really amazing. One very funny thing happened in the hotel with us by the way. We all four were(half naked) on our beds and gossiping, suddenly a lady came in and tried to teach us how to use the western toilet. Her English was pretty bad and one of us had to go with her to the toilet and understand what she wanted to say. We could not believe it, using the toilet was such a trivial thing. May be she thought we don't look western and might not be used to such toilets ;)
Next morning we went out for Pisa. It was a four hour journey by train, and was pretty enjoyable. The train was running just along the western coast of Italy and the beautiful beaches were often coming on the left side of our train. Pisa is a very small town with river Arno passing through it. Apart from the leaning tower there was nothing much to see there and hence we finished everything within 1-2 hours and then went to Florence. It took around 1 and a half hour to reach Florence. Florence was really amazing. The architecture, the various sculptures, the crowd, music and everything there were simply incomparable. The city has tiny streets with huge buildings on both sides, we found many street singers who were as good as professional ones. The river Arno added another charm to it. We had to come to another station at night to catch the train back to Trieste. We had lots of problems in finding out the station called Carpe di Mar (I guess). We got lost at many places as we did not have a map of the city. Finally a German lady helped us a lot. And we could manage to find the station. We had to wait there for couple of hours as our train was at 1:45 am. The train was again crowded and I could not sleep much which forced me to bunk the lectures on Monday (except the first one) :(

The School so far!

The ICTP summer school so far is going fine. Although the first week was a bit boring for me, this week seems pretty exciting. The first week was mainly about structure formations, galaxy clusters, weak lensing, gravitational waves, dark energy etc. This week we are having topics more close to particle physics phenomenology like neutrinos in astrophysics and cosmology, Dark matter, Inflation etc.The lecturers are excellent without any doubt. The crowd here is also amazing with lots of diversity. People from almost every part of the world I can see here. There are lots of participants from India as well, most of whom I had met before in various schools and conferences. And I have found four lecturers of SERC schools also here. It's been a nice time here so far, not feeling like being away from home except for the food may be!