Meeting part I

Finally it happened today, the much awaited meeting with my supervisor. I was with him for almost five hours including lunch. Though there were not much technical discussion, I got a bad headache after the meeting, and had to drink 3 cups of expresso to feel better ;-) . Anyway I fortunately could get my PhD registration form signed from him which I was supposed to submit in January 2009. I hope the stupid academic office won't delay my degree for this. Well, today Prof Godbole from CHEP, IISc Bangalore has also come to the department for discussions related to a DST(Department of Science and Technology) project which has been sanctioned recently. The project is all about Symmetries beyond the standard model and possible LHC signatures as well as connection to dark matter. The topic seems interesting from current research trends in high energy physics. There seems to be so much work going on these issues, I am totally confused which one to pick up and move ahead. There are many ways to incorporate higher symmetries in the standard model and each one has its own motivations. Tomorrow we will be having a formal meeting with Prof Godbole along with my supervisor as well as Prof Ramadevi and to discuss how to proceed. And I have to go through three PRD's tonight, and report if I find something interesting :( . By the way it was a great pleasure to meet Prof Godbole for the first time in a formal way. I became a fan of her after she published her book "Theory and Phenomenology of Sparticles" with Manuel Drees and Probir Roy. I will call it the bible of supersymmetry phenomenology. I am looking forward to tomorrow's meeting with the hope of getting some new ideas to work with :-)

Meeting with Supervisor after three Months..;-)

Tomorrow I am hopeful of catching up with my PhD supervisor as he is visiting his home institute for two days. I met him in the first week of August, since then there were around 15 email exchanges between us related to various stuffs. Although he managed to give couple of useful feedbacks regarding my paper (which I have recently submitted to PLB) , I am not being able to work much towards my next paper. I always feel, I need to do lots of live discussions to clear doubts and move ahead which is hardly a reality. And my supervisor is so busy with non-academic activities that he hardly replies to my mails. Sometimes I get replies to some mails sent around two months before. I do not think I am smart enough to carry on my research like that. I always feel like communicating this to him, specially from next semester point of view. This semester at least I am finishing my coursework although not being able to do much research , but in the next semester I have no purpose of staying in the campus if my supervisor is not here. The problem is that he is going to McGill on sabbatical for the next semester, which again gonna screw my research. I have spent two semesters already here in the campus (autumn 2008, autumn 2009) without much progress in my work as my supervisor was in a different institute. I just do not want to make such a repetition in the next semester. It's two frustrating to spend days without any useful work. Let's see what happens tomorrow, just keeping my fingers crossed.

May their souls rest in peace...

Today, the 30th October reminds us of the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of Assam. A couple of serial blasts within few hours rocked various parts of the state with Guwahati, the heart of North-East the worst sufferer. More than 100 people were killed and thousand injured in the blasts. Guwahati probably does not live with the same spirit as Bombay lives and I am pretty sure the memories of last year are still haunting the Guwahatians. While talking to friends, relatives staying in the city I feel it, they are scared to go out for classes, office etc as if the same thing gonna happen today which happened one year back. As usual, the local media is also making too much hype putting all those terrible blast pictures on the front pages of news papers. Anyway life is not all about getting scared thinking what happened in the past, people need to move on looking towards a better future. Let's pray for all those innocent victims, may their souls rest in peace.

Do we need "Bombay to Mumbai" type conversions every year?

It has become so common nowadays to see changes in the name of cities, streets as well as states in India. Every time I see the news "Union Cabinet has approved the change in nomenclature from xyz to abc", I find it so odd. People are so used to the earlier names that such a sudden change brings real chaos. Someone says correctly that everything was done by the British, we just keep changing the names. I agree that, some regional sentiments are attached to such changes. The names given by the British to the cities, states may not sound like the way it should be according to the language specific to that state. But why no one was there to think about it before? Its more than sixty years now since India got independence and now people are becoming desperate to change everything. They don't even realize how long it will take for the new name they give to become familiar to the world. For example if you change the name of a fifty year old institute like IIT Bombay to IIT Mumbai just because some political parties change the name of the city from Bombay to Mumbai, people would find it very difficult (specially abroad) whether these two names correspond to the same institute or not and that will surely gonna affect the academic part. But no matter what happens to the institute reputation and popularity, political parties will change the name for sure sooner or later. Today I have seen "Orissa is now Odisha, Oriya becomes Odiya" in Times of India which is just a replica of Bombay->Mumbai, Bangalore->Bangaluru and many others. I remember people in my state were also proposing the change of the name from "Assam" to "Asom". I am however not in favor of it. Basically the true ethnic pronounciation is neither Assam nor Asom. It is just a convenient way to write since there are some letters in Assamese alphabet which are pronounced in such a way that there is no counterpart in English or in Hindi. People write those alphabets either by using "s" or "h" in English. Thus although change in such nomenclature may have some correctness in the case of other states, this is not the case with "Assam->Asom". May be we should better stick to the earlier and most popular name of our state. Personally I feel, its the people of the state who have to carry the true identity of the state they belong to and their ethnic culture, not the name of the state.

Coupling Constant Unification

Currently I am working on gauge coupling unification in certain specific models. I studied basic renormalization in abelian gauge theory as well as scalar field theory during my MSc coursework but did not study renormalization group evolution properly. My supervisor advised me to look at Weinberg's QFT volumes, and believe me I liked the way this renormalization topic is written in that book and that has probably given me enough enthu to spend 3500 bucks to buy all the three volumes. The renormalization group evolution is given by $ \mu (d g/d \mu) = \beta(g) $, where g is the coupling constant and $ \mu $ is the mass scale. Thus this equation basically predicts the evolution of the gauge coupling constant with energy scale. I have not yet looked into the derivations of the beta functions for the most general case. I am just using the standard formula for one-loop beta function from text books and using it in my own model. The new thing I have learnt is that choosing a specific gauge group does not decide the beta function completely. Its the particle content of that group: the fermions, gauge bosons as well as Higgs scalars which decide the form of beta function. Thus for the same gauge group if we modify the particle content, the beta function will also change and accordingly the evolution of the coupling constants.

String Theory Video Lecture Part 5

Yesterday we had the video screening of String Theory Lecture part 5 by Prof Shiraz Minwalla. It was longer than the previous ones as well as harder to follow. He was doing Path Integrals and Conformal Field Theory most of the time, both of which I have not learned yet in a systematic way. He is referring to the chapter on CFT in Polchincki's book. I really need to go through it before attending the next video. It is not possible to sleep also during the video lecture since not more than five people come for it...:P Hence there is no other way than listening carefully to what Prof Minwalla says.

An Unbelievable/Uncomfortable/Inconvenient Truth

Yesterday I came to know about an article related to P. Sainath, the 2007 winner of Magsaysay Award for journalism, literature, and creative communication arts and his studies as well as various published articles on Indian Poverty. The article titled "Uncomfortable Truth: P. Sainath reminds us that India is still a poor country" was published more than one year ago. The link to the same is here (http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/173677093_1.html). It is billion times more shocking than "An Inconvenient Truth", the documentary film on global warming. Nowadays due to media coverage as well as increase in public awareness, global warming has become the topic of discussion everywhere and people at least know what it is. But this "Uncomfortable Truth" about Indian poverty will probably give a shock to people from all over the world. Specially at a time when Indian economy is considered as one of the fastest growing economy and people projecting Indian economy as one of the most dominant one in coming years, people can hardly imagine that more than seventy percent of the Indian population is below the so called poverty line. However the Government report says a different story (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India). It is difficult to say which one is true. But an extensive study made by a person like P. Sainath can not be ignored at all. I do not know how the Indian Government will react to it. But if it is true, it will surely show how fragile Indian economy is. After all, an economy which is surviving on just one fourth of the population can not be a stable economy although for a certain period it may show significant growth. I have just come to know that P. Sainath is coming to IIT Bombay sometime in November. I hope he will make the things clear to us.