My last SERC school :)

The days I spent in Delhi during the SERC school 2011 were simply amazing and they were pretty much same as my BSc days there. I never thought I will be commuting everyday from North Delhi to Jamia to attend the lectures which starts at 9:15 am and that was the very reason I sent couple of requests to some of the people in CTP, Jamia I know, to provide me an accommodation. And I am very thankful to them for making my accommodation ready after 3-4 days of my arrival in Delhi. But once I started staying with my ccousins/friends in North Campus, it became really difficult to shift to Jamia. As a result I continued to travel everyday back and forth. My everyday journey used to start at 7:30 am, I took metro from GTB Nagar to Nehru Place and then took bus to Jamia and somehow managed to reach the classroom on time. Although my plan was to attend only the LHC course, I could not stop myself from attending the other two lectures, namely Black Hole thermodynamics and Inflation. Although I was not following the black hole lectures towards the end, yet it was always pleasant to attend lectures by a speaker like Prof Ashoke Sen. The inflation course was a bit fast specially for those who had not studied it earlier. But to me this course was very much kind of informative in the sense that I got to know the usual path which one should follow to build his/her own inflationary model. The LHC course part II was as good as the first one. Both Gautam and Sreerup did a great job.

26th SERC in Delhi-25

I am in Delhi currently attending the SERC school at CTP, Jamia. I reached last Sunday and I must mention that Indian Railways did a much better job this time, I reached Delhi half an hour before the scheduled arrival time ( 20 hours delay last time I came to Delhi). Half an hour vs twenty hours seemed fair enough to me as far as Indian Railways is concerned. Anyway, Delhi was quite cold few days back, but now its becoming hotter and hotter. The school is going pretty good with Prof Ashoke Sen and Prof Gautam Bhattacharyya doing an awesome job with their courses on Black Hole Thermodynamics and New Physics at LHC respectively. The Black hole course started with basics of General Relativity followed by specific examples of Schwarzschild, Kerr and Reissner-Nordstrom solutions and then going into the thermodynamic aspects. There are still four more lectures to go and Prof Sen will talk about the quantum aspects of Black Hole thermodynamics in the remaining lectures. The New Physics at LHC course started with basics of gauge theory, spontaneous symmetry breaking, introduction to standard model, the LEP results etc. Currently the course is dealing with the experimental constraints on various parameters in the theory and how we can constrain new physics beyond standard model based on LEP II results. There is not much QCD happening since the discussions so far is about LEP only and that probably makes the lectures easier to follow. He might discuss these things from LHC perspective as well and that will be slightly harder due to various QCD effects which were not there in case of LEP. This course seems much more interesting than the course "Top and Higgs Physics at LHC" in last year SERC school. That's primarily because the Professor has started with very basics and gradually moving into harder stuffs giving most of the students a feeling of what is going on. Usually it happens that in any SERC school, students do not follow both the lectures running during the first half, but this time most of us are following both the courses. Looking forward to an equally interesting second half of the school as well :)

Off to Delhi for three weeks!

Finally its decided. I am going to Delhi to attend to XXVI SERC school on Theoretical High Energy Physics at Center for Theoretical Physics, Jamia (as an unofficial participant this time). It was very hard for me to decide whether to go there or do some work in the institute itself. As two of my papers were under review, I had couple of things to do for the last few months. But on 26th January, one of them got accepted in Physical Review D and brought tremendous relief. But just around that time the reviewers comments came for the other paper. One of those comments was a bit technical and I had to re-do some calculations and re-draw some of the plots. Thankfully I could finish them from my side yesterday and now completely ready to go to the SERC school with almost zero load on my head. My fellow friends might complain that I travel too much, as is obvious from my blog also. But truly speaking, I enjoy it although I have hard time in Indian Railways most of the time. Last time I went to Delhi on New Years eve, the train was 20 hours delayed (9 hours on the station +11 hours on the way). But this time I just called up Indian Railways information center and they said that my train is delayed by 1 minute. I felt great not because of the delay by just one minute but because of the fact that Indian Railways count up to the precision of 1 minute ;-) But the train this time is a chair car train (where it is easier to get reservation within 1 week of departure date), so it might be tiring to travel for 16 hours. But anyway I believe it will be better than a sleeper coach travel for 30 hours. Looking forward to a great school this time (unlike the not so great school in Panjab University, Chandigarh last year)....

XXVI SERC THEP Main School

The XXVI SERC school in THEP will be in CTP, Jamia (New Delhi) from 31st January to 20th February'2011. The format this time is slightly different in the sense that instead of usual four courses in every main schools, this school will have three courses only: Black Hole Physics (9 lectures by Ashoke Sen), Inflation (9 lectures by Sreeramkumar) and New Physics at LHC (18 lectures by Sreerup and Gautam). I would have loved to attend the third course but I already disqualified myself by attending two main schools already. I am still thinking of attending this course unofficially, but there some issues with accommodation in Delhi and all. Although I am not in a mood of traveling yet the courses as well as the lecturers this time are so awesome that it's worth making an effort.

SERC School: The Second Half

The second half of the SERC seems more fun to me. There are three reasons for this I guess:
1. I am fully used to the situations(living and food) here which looked quite weired when I first came here.
2. 22nd April, the day on which I am leaving this place is not too far :)
3. Shiraz is taking AdS-CFT course and Loganayan is taking the tutorials.

The first two factors are psychological of course. But the third factor is a genuine one. As I have mentioned in many of my previous posts, it's always fun to attend Shiraz's lectures no matter how much I understand. But this time its both fun as well as academically interesting. May be because I had little exposure to string theory from previous SERC school and some of Shiraz's lecture videos, I am finding the present lectures not too hard. And best thing is that Shiraz and Loga both are very enthusiastic for both in and outside classroom discussions. Since the crowd in the school is from various backgrounds in the sense that all did not have any exposure to string theory before, Shiraz has to digress a lot in between the lectures. Most of the questions people ask in the class are very broad questions rather than technical. I don't understand why people don't ask such questions outside the classroom, e.g. in the tutorials or dinner table. Nobody can learn string theory in just nine lectures on AdS-CFT and Hydrodynamics. Better we should stick to the technical aspects of the topic rather than asking questions like "Why string theory is the best theory of quantum gravity?, Why LQG does not work as good as string ?...." bla bla. From tomorrow onwards he will start with the fluid dynamics aspects after the brief review of Large N gauge theories and AdS-CFT correspondence in last five lectures.

SERC main school: the brighter aspects!

I have been complaining about the SERC main school arrangements at PU, Chandigarh in my previous posts. Well, that's not the only thing I have to say about this school. This school as it seems has a brighter side also. Let's start with the academics part. Perturbative QCD is something I am learning for the first time, revising Feynman diagram calculations in the tutorials, learning BSM physics phenomenology from in the GUT course, discussing with profs as well as fellow participants on various issues. Its really fun, although a bit hectic sometimes. Regarding non-academic aspects, we had an awesome trip to Amritsar and Wagha border on 7th April. It's a five hour drive from Chandigarh. We were nine together in the trip, started very early at around 5 am and came back at midnight. We went to the Golden temple, Durgiana mandir, Jaliwanwalabagh and Wagha Indo-Pak border. The golden temple is really great, a very clean and well maintained place, definitely worth visiting. We have two more holidays, hopefully will make full use of them :-)

"It's not even bad, it's horrible" Part 2

Even after the completion of 7th day of the school, the situations at Academic Staff Hostel (where 13-14 participants have been put) have not improved much. I could not find water in the toilets both yesterday and today morning. And today morning at 8 am I could not get hot water as well as running water. Its crazy! I had to take bath with cold water. In fact many people did not take bath even. I have no idea why the organizers are like this. I can keep on complaining, but I am too tired of that now. Already enough conversations have taken place with the organizers regarding this. Similar is the case with the food. They are still giving us no choices in any of the meals. Whatever single item they prepare, you have to eat that. Today I had to eat Parantha in the morning which I am pretty sure, will damage my health if I continue it for few days. I asked the stupid caterers to make bread toast but they did not. I simply cant believe this. The lunch and dinner they make very spicy always, have not seen yellow daal even a single day. I am getting sick of all these, definitely gonna lose weight at the end of this school. Its just the awesome academic side of the school, I am continuing here, otherwise I don't give a damn! May be I should change the title of this post by using some stronger adjectives next time I write again about it.

"It's not even Bad, it's Horrible"

Today was the second day of 25th SERC main school in THEP at Punjab University, Chandigarh. Although today (the 3rd day at the campus) I am feeling much better than the day I arrived (may be I am getting used to the situations), things have not been settled yet. The main problem so far here is the Horrible accommodation we are provided with. Neither we saw such arrangements in any school, conferences nor we are used to such situations in our own academic institutions. They have put fourteen participants including me in a place called Academic Staff College Hostel. Although the rooms are quite okay, the bathrooms were unimaginably pathetic on the very first day we arrived. First of all there is a common bathroom for all of us unlike usual guest houses where we get attached bathrooms. Above all, the floor of the bathroom was covered with water, there was no running water in the toilets as well as the showers. Although they said that in the evening and in the morning running water is there for two hours each yet we did not get that in the toilets. After the tiring long journey from our respective home institutes to here, we were really frustrated with the situations here. We made a formal complaint to the director of the school describing our situations and requesting him to provide us with better accommodations. But he said that's impossible and promised to make the conditions of the bathrooms better. However his reaction to our complaints was not at all satisfactory due to many of his unnecessary comments which I would prefer to avoid here. Yesterday they have however made the situations a bit better but not up-to the mark. But may be because the hectic classes, tutorials have started, the attention of the students have gradually deviated from bathrooms to academics. Anyway that does not mean that we are satisfied with the arrangements. We are unhappy with not only the bathrooms, but with the food we are getting here. We hardly have any choices. For example in the breakfast they provide only one item which of course not all people might prefer. Same is the case with other meals. As one of my fellow victim says "Its not even bad, its horrible" ;-). I hope from next time onwards the SERC national organizing committee will make sure of good arrangements to all students as well as lecturers before deciding the venue. Will update about the academic part next time, I am pretty sure I would be having many things to share as some of the finest lecturers like Prof Goran Senjanovic, Prof Rahul Basu, Prof Borut Bajc among others are giving lectures as well as taking tutorials here.

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!

SERC XXV Main School in Theoretical High Energy Physics

The official announcement for the 25th SERC (Science and Engineering Research Council) school in theoretical high energy physics to be held in Punjab University, Chandigarh, India from 2-22nd April, 2010 came almost one month before. However the official poster for advertisement came two days back. The courses this year seems interesting like those of the previous school. Usually what happens is that people don't attend two consecutive SERC main school since the topics are totally different in two consecutive schools. But to my surprise, this SERC school topics are not too much unrelated to those covered in the previous one. In the previous main school we had basic string theory course and in the coming one there is a course on AdS-CFT and hydrodynamics. Similarly we had cosmology and particle physics course in the previous school and there is a course on GUT and leptogenesis in the coming one. So it is very difficult to resist from applying for the coming school as it appears (to me at least) that the topics covered in the previous school may come out to be of much help while attending the coming school. The poster for the school containing the details is below(click the image to get a better view):

After attending string theory lectures by Prof Sunil Mukhi in the previous SERC school, I am really looking forward this time to attend the AdS-CFT lectures by another big shot in string theory, Prof Shiraz Minwalla. The course on GUT, leptogenesis will be an another attraction of this school since the lecturer is Goran Senjanovic from ICTP, Trieste and the tutor is Borut Bajc. These names are very familiar to me for a long time since I have been reading couple of papers written by Goran, Borut, Aulakh et al. It will be a great privilege for me to meet these three big shots in High Energy Phenomenology at the same time. I just hope I will get selected to participate in the school.

SERC Main School in THEP, 2009

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

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

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

SERC Preparatory School in THEP'2008

Recently I went to participate in the SERC preparatory school in Theoretical High Energy Physics(THEP) organised by SGTB Khalsa College (University of Delhi) from 23rd Sep to 20th Oct' 2008. Details about the school is given here
http://sgtbkhalsa.du.ac.in/serc.htm
It was an awesome experience to be a part of it. Specially the course on QFT by Palash Pal(SINP) and Amitabha Lahiri(SNBNCBS) was mind-blowing. Unfortunately they did not give any soft-copy of their notes which I could share with. Secondly the course on Particle Physics and Standard Model by Anindya Datta(CU) and Rahul Basu(IMSc) was also of much benefit as far as Phenomenology is concerned. They taught from a proper phenomenology point of view which was definitely of my as well as many other's interest. Prof Datta had severe cough/throat problems during the school. Surprisingly he did not even use the loudspeaker. So there was "basically" no chance of relief. During his last two lectures which were a bit boring ( it was about the parton model) many of us were busy conducting some experiments inside the classroom. Me and Sushant were counting how many times Prof Datta had to cough during his one and a half hour class. The result we arrived at was 348(+/-5) times in one and a half hour. This is a damn big figure. I wanted to warn him regarding this and to request him to take proper care..but unfortunately I could not dare to do that. Some other guys counted how many times he used the word "basically" in the class. They arrived at some figures which we found very difficult to accept. We also counted how many times he used the word "however" and arrived at 58(+/-3.5) in one and a half an hour. It was real fun to do these experiments at the time when the world is busy in doing experiments like LHC, RHIC etc...
Apart from the courses and the profs the students were really cool( upto some good tolerable approximations) and I really had a very good time with them. People like Sudhanwa Patra(PRL), Kaushik(Mysore Univ), Debraj(SNBNCBS), Arun, Prakhar (BHU),Shruti, Sandhya, Pooja(DU) among others were truly fun-loving. Although Pooja turned dangerous sometimes but finally there was not much problem..she got back her "coolness" finally. I should not forget Dr Mamta (the Director of the school) who was so caring and cool. Apart from that she was the most beautiful lady in the SERC school( as Kaushik bravely mentioned that in front of her). Patra was the most popular student there. He became famous after many funny incidents happened to him which I have to skip here.He was a real genius in QFT and a passionate guy about calculating scattering cross sections of various processes.Even Profs e.g. Rahul Basu and Anjan Sen made fun out of him.It was really amazing...
I am missing those people now a lot. Hope to see you guys again....Rock On!!