Thursday, June 24, 2010

Germany vs Ghana: Post match celebrations were awesome :)

It was a pretty good match. Although Germans won it, Ghana also gave a good fight. Ghana is playing consistently good football in this world cup no matter how many times they have won or lost. They made couple of good attempts last night specially the one which was saved by defender Lahm. That would have been a goal for sure if Lahm had not come in between. The Germans started celebrating after the end of the match as it guaranteed their position in then ext round. But it was not clear which will be the second team from that group who will make it to the second round since the match between Australia and Serbia was still going on. It ended just a few minutes after the the first match and then it became clear that Ghana is the second team which has qualified to the second round. Immediately after that celebration started in both the camps in Johannesburg. The Ghana players took off their jerseys and were running around the field with their national flag in hand. It was a superb atmosphere there, a very rare occasion where both the teams celebrate after the match which did not end in a draw :)

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Good to see England qualifying into the 2nd round

It's good to see the England football team qualifying into the second round of FIFA'2010 world cup. After the first two matches where England did not play up to the mark, today they bounced back against Slovenia and won it by 1-0. Since I am going there next week, I am pretty excited about their win as the football spirit will still be alive there. I really love the crazy European football fans. Last time I was in Germany when Euro cup 2008 was going on in Austria and Switzerland. I went to Vienna just one day before the match of Germany and Austria. And the fans of both the teams were cheering for their teams on the streets, pubs and all even before the start of the match. I really loved the kind of atmosphere there. Hope to see similar crazy football fans in UK as well. Till then please keep the winning spirit alive, England.

TOOLS'2010

I am going to participate in the conference cum workshop called TOOLS (http://www.next-institute.ac.uk/tools2010.html) to be held at University of Southampton from 29th June to 2nd July,2010. This will basically involve series of lectures and tutorials on some very useful numerical packages which are often used in particle physics phenomenology. I am typically interested in learning some packages which can be used in various dark matter related phenomenology for example, micromega, darksusy etc. Of course, packages like Pythia will also be something I would look forward to learning. Let's see how much can be learned in a four day long workshop. Giving talk there is optional, not compulsory. My visa formalities were killing my time and peace in such a way that I could not even plan a talk. I could give a talk on my recent arxiv pre-print I mentioned in one of my previous posts. I will try to keep the slides ready anyhow, and if I get some free slot there, may be I will request the organizers to give me an opportunity. I am flying on 28th June, will reach LHR in the morning, planning to roam a little and them go to Southampton. I am also planning to stay there on 3rd and 4th July just to roam around in London , will come back on 5th July.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Well done NZ!

Yet another setback for "World Champion" Italy. After the draw against Paraguay, today also they are in a similar situation, a draw 1-1 against New Zealand. New Zealand did a superb job with a fantastic goal by Smeltz in the 7th minute itself. Italy would have found them nowhere if they had not got the penalty chance which they successfully converted to make the score 1-1. Paraguay from this group has already made into top 16 after their win over Slovakia today. Let's see which one from NZ and Italy make it to top 16 from this group. It's now time for the super Sunday match which is starting within three hours from now.....

Fifa WC going crazy this time....

Fifa WC going crazy this time, with some of the most favorite teams going down against low profile teams. Specially the Europeans have disappointed us a lot e.g. France, Spain and England. Germans, who have already suffered couple of blows before the kick off with captain Ballack ruled out are however doing a great job compared to the other leading European teams. Their lost to Serbia is unacceptable to me, it was the God damn referee who won against them, not the Serbians. Hope Germans will make it to top 16 and will keep their fighting spirit alive. From England, its nonsense to hope for something better. No matter they win or they lose, the way they are playing is simply horrible. In spite of having couple of big shots like Rooney, Lampard, Gerrard, Terry they are playing very discouraging football. Spain's loss was the most unacceptable although they gave a good fight, could not convert so many opportunities. I still have hope from them anyway. France looks dead, may be due to awful team management or something else. Holland seems to have made entry into top 16 after their second consecutive win yesterday. Argentina seems to be playing as expected, looks quite good. This time I am surprised to see the African teams like Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria playing much better football than teams like England. These African teams hardly give up till the last second. I watched Ghana and Cameroon's match yesterday against Australia and Denmark respectively and they looked very very promising. Hope that they will keep that spirit alive and teach a good lesson to our favorite Europeans. Looking forward to Brazil vs Ivory Coast today..the Pepsi day :)

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

arXiv number 2

My second paper appeared in arXiv yesterday http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.2245 . This is a study of different Left-Right symmetric models with and without supersymmetry. We tried to look at the possibility of obtaining a TeV (Trillion electron volt) scale $ SU(2)_R $ gauge symmetry breaking scale, tiny neutrino masses and gauge coupling unification simultaneously. The motivations for a TeV scale new physics just beyond the standard model of particle physics are tremendous nowadays with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), the 14 TeV machine has started operating last year. We minimize the scalar potential for all such models and check whether the ground state allows a TeV scale $ SU(2)_R $ breaking scale and tiny neutrino masses from either type I or type II/type III seesaw mechanisms. Then we check the gauge coupling unification for the supersymmetric cases to see whether unification is achievable for a TeV scale intermediate scale between standard model and the grand unification scale. We also add parity odd singlet field to the minimal versions of the left-right models so as to break the discrete parity symmetry called D-parity between the left and right handed sectors much before the $ SU(2)_R $ breaking scale. In such models the type II/ type III seesaw terms become sensitive to the D-parity breaking scale and the type I term is sensitive to $ SU(2)_R $ breaking scale like in the usual case. We have found that only in supersymmetric left-right models with Higgs doublets we can have a TeV scale intermediate breaking scale, gauge coupling unification and small neutrino masses from either type I or type III contributions. The other cases with Higgs triplet/ bitriplet the intermediate breaking scale gets closer to the unification scale. The details can be found in the above link. Comments and criticism are welcome.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

End of my stay @PRL :'(

The official duration of my visit to PRL is going to expire on June 30th. However I am leaving before that as I have to do some visa formalities in Bombay. In the last three years I have visited many institutes, but did not get attached to any one of them like I have got to PRL. I hardly feel like leaving this place, but have no choice. The crowd, the hostel, the food, the facilities were superb here. I found them much better than those in IITB. One good thing here is that it's a small institute with less number of people and all are more or less familiar to me. But in a place like IITB where there are five thousands students in around twenty departments, most of the people are unfamiliar to me. Moreover, being a lazy person, the city Ahmedabad suits me much more than Bombay. There are many such factors which made me fall in love with this place. My love for this place helped me do some good work, learning couple of new things also, which hardly happened during my stay at IITB. I wrote a paper on left-right symmetric models with spontaneous D-parity breaking which is being finalized now and will be put in arXiv tomorrow or may be next week. I will post the technical details of the work very soon. Thanks to my supervisor here as well as my friends for various useful discussions which helped me to finish the work. I would love to come back to this place again and again and get some good work done. And leaving aside work, I always have many reasons to visit PRL, may it be cricket, volleyball and....

Monday, June 7, 2010

AF (BOM->CDG) once again :)

I booked my ticket to ICTP two days back. And its the same Air France flight I took two years back from Bombay to Paris. I have one hour stoppage at CDG, Paris and then have a flight to Marco Polo Airport, Venice. Last time I did not enjoy my flight much, I was very much scared, anxieties made me so nervous. Just after I boarded the flight in Bombay, I slept although not in a comfortable way (I really did not like the tiny economy class seats of AF). I missed my food, wine everything. My experience at the CDG airport was also not so good, I felt like lost. The airport was so crowded. One old American gave me company at the airport. He liked my t-shirt quote and started gossiping with me. I think this trip will be more fun, as I am no longer scared of international travel. And the good thing is that I am going there for just two weeks. It feels great when the date of coming back to homeland looks very close :)

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Rajneeti @Saturday 10 AM show

Today we (22 people from the hostel :P) went for Rajneeti, Prakash Jha's latest movie starring many versatile actors. As I expected based on Jha's earlier movies, this movie turned out to be a good one. I found it better than Jha's last movie Apaharan. Although Gangajal was perhaps better than this one. Like many other people I also thought that this movie will be based on Sonia Gandhi's life. But it turned out to be a mixture of many flavors. Among them are the Mahabharata, Godfather and a little bit of Gandhi (Sonia) family. The role of Nana Patekar ( who played a similar role like Krishna of Mahabharata) was mind-blowing. Arjun Rampal, Manoj Bajpai, Ajay Devgan were also amazing. Although Ranbeer Kapoor plays the main role in the movie (Arjun of Mahabharata), I did not find him extra-ordinary. Katrina was doing a good job if you compare her to Sonia Gandhi in the movie, her Hindi was perfectly matching with that of Sonia's ;). Although the movie was a bit long, there were no typical bollywood songs or item numbers to bore the audience, the songs were being played in the background only. However there were some scenes which are not much necessary, if omitted could have made the movie a little shorter. Anyway overall, it was a good entertainer and definitely worth sixty bucks ;)

Thursday, June 3, 2010

..The clouds are all beside me to see me through all the good times...:)

Suddenly the weather in Ahmedabad has taken a U-turn. The scorching heat which claimed around thirty lives in the city has suddenly turned into a pleasant weather after yesterday's rainfall. I felt so delighted to see white as well as black clouds in the sky which is a rare phenomenon in a city with a very hot and dry weather. The clouds reminded me of my native place where they are always there :). The smell of the soil after rainfall was superb, I opened the window of my lab at seventh floor of the building and enjoyed the scenery and the smell. The sky looked so amazing with those scattered white and black clouds with little blue portion of the sky visible in between. I had a plan of taking some photos during the sun-set but unfortunately my stupid camera was not working. The pattern formation in the sky during the sunset was amazing due to the presence of those clouds, the sky looked like a painting with many colors on it...I hope the clouds will be with us for some more time, keeping the temperature bearable and keeping the sky as beautiful as it is now.