Upcoming Conferences Dec-Jan 2012-13

There are couple of nice conferences coming up in next 2-3 months in India which most of the researchers working in the field of high energy physics (HEP) must be waiting for. The first one is TeV particle astrophysics (TeVPA) 2012 (https://grapes-3.tifr.res.in/indico/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=0) to he held at Tata Institute, Bombay during December 10-14, 2012. Looking at the amount of experimental as well as theoretical activities going all around the world on particle astrophysics (dark matter, in particular), this conference would be really exciting. Among other things, I would probably look forward to talks or discussions on 130 GeV gamma ray  line claimed to be present in the Fermi-LAT data ( analyzed by C. Weniger first, who is coming to this conference as a panel speaker). No matter this line is real or not, but the excitement it has created for last couple of months is truly amazing. One another conference (symposium) which almost all Indian HEP people keep looking for is the DAE-BRNS symposium on high energy physics that happens every alternate years. I was there in the last symposium of this series and the experience was amazing probably because of the time and place of the event. It was in the month of December at Jaipur two years back. This time it is being organized at Shantiniketan by Visva Bharati University. The organizers have finally come up with a website and extended the registration deadline also by around 17 days (from October 31 to November 17). The details can be found here http://www.visva-bharati.ac.in/news/DAE-2013/index.html.

Impact Factors, citations bla bla...

As the competition in academics is getting tougher and tougher due to recession, fund cuts or whatever, it seems to me that certain things like "journal impact factor", "number of citations" etc have become very very important and grabbing more attention than ever. Though I am just a beginner in this field, I feel as if I have started hearing more about these keywords nowadays than I did say, four five years back. Anyways, I guess independent of any personal experiences, it is the overall trend these days. Earlier, if someone has a paper in a journal like Physical Review D, nobody would care about the present impact factor of this prestigious journal. But, with the journal market growing bigger and bigger (and flooded with many open access journals whose sole target is just to publish articles based on the money author gives, rather than the quality of the work), the race towards high impact factor has become more and more visible. Like my PhD supervisor, I never paid much attention to these things as long as we get one or two papers per year in a reputed journal like Physical Review D. I was also unaware of the mechanism which governs the impact factor. But as expected, things like impact factor plays non-trivial role in getting you a job. And that's when I had to search for the impact factors of the journals where I got some papers published. In my job applications I had to write clearly the impact factors of all the journals. I don't know how much that did help me getting a job, but I always hope that my favorite journals like Physical Review among a few others  will maintain their quality always and people wont be caring much about their impact factors, their very names would carry their impact rather than some real numbers known as impact factor which results from some data analysis. Recently, I saw the list of journal impact factors for the year 2011. And I saw some tables showing the number of citations each journal has got in that year and depending on that, the impact factors were ordered (roughly speaking). There were couple of surprises in that table (I hope I dint look at a fake one). For example Physics Letters B impact factor has decreased substantially from around 5 to around 3.5. To a less extent Physical Review D and JHEP impact factor also decreased. Journals like IJMPA, EPJC has somewhat maintained the same impact factor as before, but MPLA impact factor seems to have decreased. Anyways, to conclude the last few lines, all the familiar journals to hep-ph community (at least) have lost their impact factors to some extent. That's heartbreaking indeed. However,  I saw one journal whose impact factor seems to have increased a lot, that's journal of physics G. It's current impact factor is around 4.something. I am sure it was lower than this earlier. Obviously, it has got enormous number of citations as well. That made me think how come a journal in which  I hardly see any paper related to hep-ph can get such a huge number of citations. I had no clue, and I dint even bother to find out. But while reordering the bibliography of a paper I am writing, suddenly I saw one paper in this journal which I am citing. And yes, as expected that's the particle data group (PDG) paper published in 2010 which has around 4000 citations now. So, that's how it works. Even if a journal does not have a significant number of articles important to myself or hep-ph in general compared to other popular journals, even a paper with such huge citations in a year or so can make a big difference. Anyways, I hope I won't get driven into such a race of impact factors and would be ignoring these issues consistently throughout my life and hope my present favorite journals will always remain favorite to me :)

Physical Review has changed my opinion about peer review!

Couple of months ago, I posted something expressing my anger and frustration about scientific peer review. I had a hard time then dealing with the referee's comments related to one of my papers. Sometimes referee suggest some more work, and after I actually do them and resubmit, the referee comes up with some other objections and reject the whole paper and the whole process cost me several months. Sometimes the situation is even worse. The editor responds like this: "One referee recommends publishing your paper and one referee doesn't. Hence I decide not to publish your paper." I am not kidding, this indeed happened with me. But after I started sending papers to Physical Review, my opinions about scientific peer review have changed. No matter they publish your article or not, the comments of criticism they send are really helpful. It helped me learn much beyond the content of my paper, and in some cases improved the quality of the paper by several times. Rejection on the basis of concrete justifications is never depressing, it is rather encouraging to do better. I have become a big fan of Physical Review now and would always prefer to send my articles to them without worrying too much about impact factors. But of course, I have not communicated with many other publishers, so can't comment on whether they will be better or worse than Physical Review in terms of reviewers comments.

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.

No work and all roaming!

I did some work related to unification of couplings as well as fermion masses in a specific supersymmetric model. After the work is done and a 14 page draft is written, I came to know that the assumption I have taken in the calculation is not always correct. I have mentioned that in one of my previous post that I assumed the validity of survival hypothesis which says that the physical mass of the scalars are same as the mass parameters that arise in the lagrangian or superpotential. But this is not always true as shown by some authors few years back. The second problem which I have recently caught my notice is that one group had already done similar studies related to the same model I am working. But they did not although considered the fermion mass running and all. I have no clue if whatever I have done so far is good enough for making the work complete. My supervisor seems to be optimistic about it but I am not. I have two more pending works which I will start only after coming back from ICTP on 31st July. This one and half months starting from mid June to July end don't look much fruitful as I have not done any work but just roaming here and there. Looking forward to the end of my academic trips!

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.

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.

Doing research through Skype ;-)

When I installed skype for the first time, I never thought I will be doing research related things with it. I just wanted to see my friends, relatives and talk to them free of cost. But yesterday I had a skype meeting with my PhD supervisor (who is on sabbatical leave nowadays). We had around 15 minutes chat where we discussed about the work I was doing with him and some possible things we might wish to look at. It was much better than e-mail discussions I must say, where I have to wait till someone read my mail and reply back, and in some cases by the time I get the reply, I forget the topic of discussion ;). Till we get back to one place, I hope we will be communicating through skype only. I was busy with doing some corrections to my first paper with my friend and was not being able to look at the work with my guide properly. I have finished all the corrections today and hopefully they will be enough for the paper to get published. I am really dying to focus my attention to some new and interesting work (which also includes the work I have been doing with my supervisor).

The Second Phase of the Asian Winter school

The second phase of the Winter school here at Mahableshwar started yesterday, which was a really hectic day (with the schedule from 9 am to 9 45 pm) after the tiring trip and banquet party on Sunday. A couple of new lectures have started: AdS-CFT and hydrodynamics by Shiraz, Finite temperature aspects of AdS-CFT by L. Yaffe, HEP Phenomenology by John Ellis (CERN). Shiraz has started with elementary fluid dynamics and after giving two lectures on it, he has moved to the gravity aspects of it. The best part in his lectures is that he never skip anything, he tries to explain each and every point thoroughly no matter how long it takes. Although I never attended his lectures before, I became a great fan of him after I watched his string theory lecture videos (upto part 7) in our Physics department as I mentioned before in my blog. I am not being able to follow Yaffe's lectures however, many of the technical terms he is using are unfamiliar to me. The lectures by John are however too elementary for me since I have been working on particle physics phenomenology for last one year. But still I can't sleep during his lectures, in fact nobody can. He keeps the whole audience alive through his amazing sense of humor and the funny animations in his slides. The school is going to end day after tomorrow; it was really fun both from academic as well as non-academic point of view :P

The Asian Winter School so far

I am attending the 4th Asian Winter School on strings, particles and fields. So far its really great from both academic and non-academic point of view. The location (Mahableshwar) is really cool, the hotel we are staying as well as the food are superb. The lecturers are also great. Andrew Strominger (Harvard U.) has given four lectures on string theory and black holes (Kerr-CFT correspondence to be precise), Antoniadis (CERN) talked about string theory and experimental signatures, Harman Verlinde (Princeton U) is giving a set of lectures on string phenomenology (solving Hiererchy problem, AdS-CFT, F-theory model building etc), Liam McAllister (Cornell U.) has given four lectures on inflationary cosmology and tomorrow he will probably address the issue of inflation within the framework of string theory, Kenneth Intriligator (UCSD) is giving lectures on susy breaking. There are couple of more interesting courses coming up. Although some lectures are too technical for someone like me who has very limited string theory background, but overall my experiences have been good. The organizers are leaving a free slot almost everyday from 3 pm to 6 30 pm for hiking around Mahabaleshwar. Its really fun. Hope the coming days will be even more fun filled. Will keep updated!!

WHEPP XI was awesome!

I am leaving Ahmedabad tonight although WHEPP XI is not over yet. It will be going on till 12th Jan, but since I have to attend the Asian Winter School at Mahabaleshwar from 11th Jan, I have to leave tonight so that I can catch the bus arranged by ICTS from Mumbai International airport to Mahabaleshwar tomorrow. Although during first two days of WHEPP I was kind of giving up with the hectic schedule, now I think I am gonna miss the last three days. It was fun as well as very useful. I came to know about so many different areas of work as well as some unsolved crucial problems. I could think of some new ideas also which I don't know how much do make sense. The best part was attending the talks/discussions by so many famous people working on HEP phenomenology like K.S. Babu, Manfred Lindner, He (the person behind type 3 seesaw), D.P.Roy, Rohini Godbole, George W.S. Hou, Amol Dighe, Thomas Hambye, Silvia Pascoli, Anjan Joshipura and many others. It was really great interacting with many of them. PRL, Ahmedabad made really good arrangements for the participants leaving no options for us to complain about. Hats off to the organizers! I also got the permit to work in PRL for next six months with Prof Utpal Sarkar and my friend Patra which is a big relief for me after the frustrating semester I spent in IIT Bombay without doing any work. I will be coming back to PRL in February first week since I will be going home after the winter school. Will update about the school next time I sing into the blogosphere.

Reviewer's comments I

Today I got the first set of comments from reviewers of Physics Letters B. They have sent eight comments. Most of them are minor ones which can be fixed by rephrasing some sentences. Some sentences are communicating a different meaning than what we want. So fixing them is not a big deal. However there is a serious conceptual issue which needs some careful study. I need to go to PRL, Ahmedabad soon to work with my collaborator on this issue and resubmit the paper again. I am quite sick of working alone and communicating via emails. There always remain a communication gap in this process. The issue we need to study is regarding R-parity violation in our model and the stability of dark matter candidate. Although any R-parity violating supersymmetric model will rule out a stable dark matter candidate, in our model I still think we can have a stable dark matter candidate which is basically the LSP (Lightest supersymmetric particle). Since our model has $ U(1)_{B-L} $ gauge symmetry, all the R-parity $ R_p = (-1)^{3(B-L)+2s} $ violating dimension four terms are absent from the lagrangian. However the terms which is responsible for mixing the standard model neutrinos with the singlet sterile neutrinos violate R-parity which we are calling as accidental breaking. Since neutrinos are even and the sterile gauge singlet fermions are odd under R-parity, their mixing will of course violate R-parity. But although the sterile neutrino need not be stable unless we incorporate some other discrete symmetries, its superpartner can be stable if its the LSP. Because there is no term in the superpotential which makes this LSP decay into two standard model particles. Hence if the superpartner of the sterile singlet neutrino becomes the LSP, it can be a stable dark matter candidate. I hope we will be able to convince the reviewers through these arguments, without calculating the life time of the dark matter candidates. The following video tells how embarrasing reviewer's comments are sometimes :D