Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Leaving for Punjab tomorrow!

I am leaving for Punjab tomorrow evening. The SERC main school will start from 2nd April as I mentioned in one of my previous posts. I hope Chandigarh will be colder than Ahmedabad where the mercury is hanging around 42-43 degree centigrade. The courses look really interesting but recently I have seen the pre-requisites mentioned in the school web-page which look really heavy. For example for the QCD and the LHC course they are asking us to be familiar with QCD basics, non-abelian structure of Lagrangian, structure functions, deep inelastic scattering, scaling, scaling violations etc. Ooops! I hardly know much about these alien topics and have not even looked at it. The pre-requisites for the other courses GUT, AdS-CFT and Hydrodynamics are however much simpler and I am at least familiar to them. And in fact I find these latter two courses more interesting although I am hopeful of learning the first two courses a little bit which look aliens to me now. Apart from academics I am planning to visit some nice places in Chandigarh as well as some neighbouring cities like Shimla. Lets see how things go!

Saturday, March 27, 2010

The Happiest Moment!

What can be the happiest moment in a research scholar's life? Well, for me its when I get reply to my mails from my supervisor :P. Today I got reply from my supervisor after a long time regarding some calculations I have done related to gauge coupling unification in some specific models. Thank god he found them quite good. Although the unification in my calculations are still partial, effort is going on to make them perfect may be at the cost of adding some new particles. But the good thing is that the I am getting unification near $ 10^{16} $ GeV (which is allowed from proton decay constraints) with a low intermediate breaking scale of the order of TeV. This looks good as it can have some LHC signatures. Lets see how things go, I am really hopeful of some good output unlike before :)

Friday, March 26, 2010

CSIR NET

Today the CSIR NET result came out, and to my surprise I cracked it. I don't know what to say, but one thing for sure: this is the easiest competitive examination in India probably. I appeared it with almost zero preparation, attempted 50 percent in paper I and 75 percent in paper II and still I got rank 70. Wow...sounds cool, isn't it? The examination was in December last year, I was busy with my semester activities till November end, then went to Guwahati for ten days, came back to Bombay just one week before the NET examination, revised some of my MSc syllabus. And the way we went to appear the exam in Pune was like going for a picnic. We were six together and most of us had no preparation at all. Anyway it was fun. Although this JRF will not be useful for me practically but it will certainly be a tag in my CV :)

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Oscar winners!

I watched Hurt Locker two days back. Never heard of it before it got the best motion picture award. Avatar got so much hype this time that all other movies remained quite unknown till the Oscar night. I have a copy of Avatar with me for last 3 months but haven't yet watched it. Hurt Locker was a nice movie based on the life of American soldiers in terror and war hit Iraq. Although the story is not so great but the movie has a good flow, I did not feel bored at any point. Unlike masala movies like Slumdog Millionaire which I still cant believe to be the best motion picture last year, movies like Hurt Locker never get much media attention. I also watched Inglourious Basterds day on Friday night. Christoph Waltz truly deserves the best supporting role award he got. The movie was also good, I just wish Hitler were killed in real life like the way those basterds kill him in the movie along with all senior nazi officers inside a cinema hall in Paris, it would have saved thousands lives. I am planning to watch Crazy Heart today which got the best male actor award, planning to get a copy of The Blind State for which Sandra Bullock got the best female actor award.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

A very unusual weekend indeed!

This weekend has started in a very unusual way for me. I used to sleep till 12 or 1 pm during weekends, but today I got up at 7:20 am and went to watch the 8:45 am show of Love, Sex and Dhoka (a hindi movie released yesterday) in a multiplex nearby. It sounds odd, but the reason behind this compromise with good sleep is to save hundred rupees. The morning show tickets cost just 45 bucks. The movie is a low budget one with no known actors in it. But still it was a good entertainer. The movie is based on three different stories with a very tiny link in between, the first one was not so great and has a very sad and brutal end, however the second and third one were funny. The details can be found in standard movie reviews which I don't need to repeat here. However, I wont recommend anyone to spend 150 bucks on it, but it does worth 45 at least :P

Trip to Bombay

I had a short trip to Bombay last weekend. But the main goal of the visit was not achieved. I planned to go there to meet a prof. but I came to know just one day before my trip that the prof wont be having time to talk to me. But still I did not cancel my trip since I made some other plans like meeting some friends, my sister and to bring some stuffs from Bombay which I don't find in Ahmedabad easily :P . The journey was pretty good, did not feel the scorching heat of summer as it was overnight journey. I reached my IITB hostel at around 7 am in the morning, had my favorite H13 breakfast. I wanted to download at least 100 GB entertainment stuffs from the LAN there, but unfortunately the "search" option in my dc++ was disabled and I had to look into every single user's shared items to look for the things I needed. I did not have much time as I had to leave the campus by 1 pm to go to meet some friends and cousins. But still I could download some 30 GB stuffs which would be okay for at least one month :P The weather in Bombay was very humid as well as hot, I found it more irritating than Ahmedabad even where its hot but not humid. One more interesting thing about the trip was that there was a girl whose seat was just next to me while going to Bombay, and the same girl had the seat eight position next to me while coming back, a great coincidence for me at least. I could also manage to bring some stuffs which could have put me into trouble, but thank god managed somehow, you know what I mean right?

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Ocean of leptogenesis

For the last few days I have been trying to learn various models of leptogenesis, the mechanism of producing a lepton-antilepton asymmetry in the early Universe. When I searched for keyword "leptogenesis" in SPIRES, it returned around 750 papers. Thank God I did not give up and dared to look into the list in search of some pioneering papers with maximum citations. I was more surprised by the number of various types of leptogenesis mechanism than the huge number of papers. Before I thought it can happen only by the decays of heavy neutrinos. But there are plenty of other scenarios: like Higgs triplet decay in type 2 seesaw mechanism, resonant leptogenesis which arises from two quasi-degenerate heavy neutrinos, supersymmetric leptogenesis, electromagnetic leptogenesis, gravitational leptogenesis and many others. I am just wondering is there any other type of leptogenesis exist which no one has considered yet. I never could imagine this to be such a vast field. I don't know what I am capable of doing in this field or what new thing is there for me to tell the world about it, but the subject is pretty interesting. After all, it addresses one of the very important issues in physics: why we see only matter around us and not anti-matter? Its very unlikely that the Universe was created with a matter-antimatter asymmetry. Thus if there were equal proportion of matter and antimatter in the early Universe then why don't we see anti-galaxies, anti-planets or may be anti-human around us? ........Leptogenesis will give you the answer!!

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Not so boring weekend!

To get rid of the sever boredom during weekend, I tried FarmVille in Facebook. I was never used to such stuffs like farmville, mafia, cafe world etc in facebook. But this weekend I joined farmville just to keep myself busy in something. Farming is not interesting at all, but at least I could spend the day by doing various things there. The most boring part of farmville is that it takes a long time for the crops to grow. Strawberry takes least time which is four hours. I don't think would be playing this on weekdays, but will return to the farm on weekends for sure when I don't have much options left.
Last night I watched Invictus by Clint Eastwood starring Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon. It was really nice. Although Matt Damon did a good job, I would give all the credits to Mr Freeman. He played the role of Nelson Mandela in the best way one can think of. It was nice to see how a simple rugby match brought a unbelievable and much needed change to the entire nation., ending the tension between black and white to a great extent. I would always recall one scene from the movie: while the final match of rugby world cup between South Africa and New Zealand was going on, some cops(white people) were listening to live updates in radio outside the stadium. One black kid (who looked like a beggar) came near them to listen to the radio, initially the cops scolded him asking him to go away. But as the match became more interesting with South Africa playing in a level much above the expectations, the cops hardly paid attention from the black kid. During the latter part of the match, the kid was sitting on the bonnet of the cops car and both the cops and the kid were cheering together. In the end when South Africa won the match, the cops were lifting and hugging the kid...it was really amazing. It seems Mandela could foresee this happening, that's why he gave so much importance to rugby during the time when the country needed much more attention from the president towards some other areas like law and order, poverty etc.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Going to IITB for 2 days!

I will be in IIT Bombay on 13-14th March,2010. One professor in my department has asked me to come there for some discussions. There will be a prof coming from IISc and we are supposed to sit together and discuss on some topics of mutual interest which have to be carried out as a DST project recently sanctioned. Although I am not officially related to the project, yet I would try to grab the opportunity to work on it with some famous people. I will come back to Ahmedabad on 14th night. Will try to visit my friends and cousins also. Although it will be a bit tiring to travel, yet I don't mind doing it, since weekends in Ahmedabad are too boring for me.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Weekdays getting more and more hectic

The weekdays are becoming very hectic for me. After I come back to hostel at 6 pm I am left with almost zero energy. I don't know how much work I do, but staying in lab from 9 am to 6 pm seems hectic. I am currently busy with a paper on some neutrino mass mechanisms. I am using mathematica to diagonalize the mass matrices and see if the desired mass spectra are coming. For a specific choice of parameters I am able to generate the desired masses, but now I think it would be better to do some parameter space study instead of choosing some specific parameter values. I am not sure if I will be able to do such things using mathematica. In fortran, things would have been much easier I guess. I just need to do a finite number of iterations for different choice of parameters within some specific ranges, diagonalize the mass matrix and store the masses in some arrays. Then I can plot mass versus the parameters and see for which parameter space I am getting the desired mass spectra. Since I am using windows in my lappy, I may have to ask the PRL people to provide me with a computer with linux installed in it.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

The most shameful act an IITian has done ever....

I came to know of a horrible incident today involving two IITians, one from IIT Roorkee and another from IIT Delhi. Although suicide incidents are very common in IIT's, this one is however more shocking and shameful. The IITR guy brutally murdered his girlfriend from IITD in a hotel in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. The guy who has been taken into police custody, has revealed that the reason behind this murder in the past affairs of his girlfriend with someone else. Whatever be the reason, nobody can justify killing someone. And personally I never expected such an act by some BTech student who usually are of very chilled out type. Anyway I never heard of such heinous and shameful act by any IITian before.

Eightfold celebrations of Holi, the festival of "color"

There was something special this time in the name of Holi. I played it (infinitesimally although) after three years, that too because some of my friends in the hostel put colors on my face when I came out of my room to have some tea. I used to enjoy this festival a lot when I was at home till my class X th. I used to go with my friends to various neighboring places in bicycles, specially to those places where the girls of our classes live. It was funny in the sense that the boys in our class hardly had any interactions with the girls, but still we dared to go to their villages in search of them just to play Holi, but never succeeded in doing so. After I came out of my home Holi became like an alien festival for me, I started preferring to stay inside than getting those sticky chemicals pasted on my face. Till I finish my student as well as hostel life Holi would always be like this for me. Any festival loses its true meaning when we are away from our close ones. May be after I go back to my state after finishing studies and all, these festivals will regain the same importance as they used to have during my childhood.