SYMPHY 2011

Physics Department, IIT Bombay is organizing the first ever in-house symposium SYMPHY 2011 on 15th January 2011. The idea is to have a formal communication among all the research scholars working in various fields in the department. Looking at the fact that there is very little interaction among the students in the department, hopefully this symposium will initiate such a process rather in a formal way. To make the event look more attractive, there will be two invited speakers Deepak Dhar and Sandip Trivedi (both from Tata Institute). The research scholars have the option to present their work either through poster or oral presentation (15+5 mins). Although initially there was a doubt that a one-day symposium won't be enough for a department which has around 50 research scholars or more. But from the submission of abstracts, it seems that one day is just perfect as we are not getting too many students willing to give talk. The list of participants as well as their talk titles have been put up in the website already. The organizers are also planning to prepare a e-booklet containing all the talk titles+abstracts which will be put in the website later. Hope SYMPHY 2011 will take off with a grand success!!

Calcutta 2011

As I have mentioned in my previous post, I was in Calcutta (now known as Kolkata) from 4th Jan to 9th Jan'2011 attending a workshop at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. The workshop was awesome both from academic point of view as well as the hospitality. Academic part I mentioned more or less in my previous post. Regarding the hospitality part, it was perhaps better than many conferences/workshops in Europe or in the US I believe. The food, the drinks, the banquet dinner were so amazing, I am having a hard time now in getting adjusted to the hostel food :( I would love to go there whenever I get an opportunity. Calcutta as a city I did not explore much, although I had one whole day free. But the public transport there is not so good although this is the only Indian city which has bus, metro and tram both. The problem is that metro and tram covers only a small portion of this huge city and 99% of the time you have to travel by bus only. And the roads (as far as I have seen) there are so small compared to other metro cities like Bombay and New Delhi, it takes too much time to travel by road. The first day I reached Calcutta, I took a cab from Howrah station to Salt Lake Sector 1 and it took more than one and a half hours although the distance was around 10-12 km. Apart from that Calcutta suffers from various political turmoils also. Political parties start rallies, protests anywhere on the street resulting in huge traffic jam. It happened during my stay there also after eight villagers were shot in Lalgarh area of West Bengal. The security of the guest house I stayed advised me not to take the risk of going out on that day. I believe there are many things to enjoy or explore in this city but the city has still to grow up to make it more tourist friendly for which better roads and better public transport is a must.

Dark Matter Workshop

The Dark Matter Workshop at SINP, Kolkata is going good so far. Today is the fourth day of the workshop and most of the areas related to dark matter theory, phenomenology and experiments have been covered so far by various invited speakers. There were talks related to model building using SUSY, GUT, Extra U(1) as well some string theory inspired models by speakers like Mambrini, Ibarra, Covi, X. Tata and many others. At the same time there were talks on experiments like DAMA (by F. Capella) , PAMELA, Fermi-LAT and other experiments as well as the possible collider signatures. It was indeed good to listen to talks covering such a wide varieties but of course crucial as far as dark matter is concerned. It seemed somehow to me that people are taking direct detection experiments and possible LHC signatures of Dark matter more seriously than indirect detection experiments like PAMELA, Fermi-LAT etc. It might be because of the existing astrophysical explanations of various cosmic ray anomalies. But as Ibarra pointed out, the Gamma ray line in the sky should be taken more seriously compared to positron excess, since it has got no astrophysical explanations. There was an interesting model where people put a chern-simons term mixing the photon with a hidden gauge boson. In that case dark matter annihilation(for relic density) and dark matter going to gamma rays involve the same vertex (rather than loop suppressed in case of neutralinos in MSSM) and hence can give rise to a TeV gamma ray line observed. Anyway it seems constraints from CDMS, XENON, signal from DAMA, Gamma ray line observed by Fermi and future collider signatures are going to play the key role in the business of dark matter!

New Years Eve 2

Finally I could reach New Delhi before new years eve. The train was delayed by 20 hours without any surprise, thanks to Gujjars as well as Indian Railways. The new years eve party was awesome as before. This time we got more company with couple of cool guys joining us. One of them, Amlan was an amazing guiterist who kept playing GnR, Nirvana and many others throughout the party. The take off was around 11 pm and it lasted till around 7 am. Fortunately I was also alive till the end with others. The bollywood item numbers munni badnam, Shiela ki jawani added spice to our crazy dances throughout the party. Although I am not a big fan of such item numbers, I could realize how awesome they become when you have suitable occasions like we had last night. May the coming year bring more such occasions to have such parties. Even if it does not, 31st Dec 2011 is anyway there by default for a blast. Will keep looking for the next party in the capitol...Hope it comes soon...Amen..................

New Year's Eve!

Maintaining the tradition of spending new year's eve in the capital, I am "planning" to leave for New Delhi tomorrow. I am saying "planning" because there is still chances of this trip getting ruined. There are some strikes going on in Rajasthan through which my train is supposed to pass through. The Gujjar community there are protesting against the government by blocking rail and road traffic. Their demand is around 5% reservations in education, jobs etc. Anyone can imagine how ridiculous the way of their protest is. As far as their demand is concerned, I would say all the Indian citizens should get reservations so as to remove the existing bias as well as to rule out such stupid agitations in future ;) My train has been diverted from the usual route I guess, and hopefully I will be able to reach New Delhi before new years' eve. The dense fog around the capital is another problem hitting both rail and air traffic. I am still optimistic about reaching Delhi somehow. I have to leave for Calcutta also for a workshop in SINP from 4th Jan-8th Jan'2011.

Rajasthan 2010

I was in Jaipur for around one week attending a conference in LNMIIT as mentioned in the previous post. The city of Jaipur has got tremendous historical importance and the number of monuments in and around the city are still carrying the pride of Jaipur and the kings who ruled there. First of all the whole city is surrounded by hills and on top of the hills you can see various forts and huge walls. The ancient city of Jaipur was slightly away from the main city today and it was surrounded by huge walls. The fort of Amber was simply amazing. The beautiful ceilings inside reminded me of some of those in Vatican museum. It was great to see the Rajasthan Government taking all necessary steps to keep the monuments evergreen. Apart from the this grand fort, the Jalmahal, the Jaigarh fort, the Nahargarh fort, the Hawa mahal, the City Palace were also amazing. Jaipur don't look so good from the point of view of a modern city, but it has got so much historical monuments that no other city in India can probably beat Jaipur. And the interesting fact is that most of the cities in Rajasthan have such huge monuments which make Rajasthan a hot tourist spot in India.

Apart from historical monuments, Rajasthan is famous for wildlife also. Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary and Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve are pretty famous for that. Bharatpur is around 4 hours journey by bus from Jaipur. It's a small town, a bit dirty and unorganized. But the autowala took us to a nice place to stay. It was a part of a person's residence which he gives to tourists on rent. It was pretty close to the gate of the Keoladeo National Park (or Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary) . We went inside the sanctuary twice: we walked on the first day and took bikes for the second day. Although the sanctuary is spread over an area of 30 square kilometer, most of it were unavailable for tourists. Apparently a tiger came out from Ranthambhore national park and entered into some village from where people drove him off to Bharatpur. The authorities are yet to transfer that tiger from Bharatpur to some other national park. People said , it would be done within one week and the entire park will then be open for visitors. We saw a wide varieties of birds there mostly unfamiliar to me. The Siberian Cranes for which the park was very famous at one time, don't come nowadays. According to a guide there, since the Afghan war started, those birds stopped visiting the park since their route to India was over Afghanistan. Apart from birds, there were deers, antilope, wild lizards, jackal and lots of cows, bulls.

Ranthambhore national park is around 190 km from Bharatpur. And there is no good bus service between these two famous tourist destinations. We had to take some pathetic train to reach Sawai Madhopur (which is the district center and very close to Ranthambhore). Sawai Madhopur is again a very small town, but fact that the town has more number of hi-class hotels than shops surprised us a lot. We need to survey a lot to find a room which fits our budget. The Taj Group , the Oberoi group also have hotels over there. And due to high demands from lots of tourists, the prices of rooms were a bit high for Indian grad students ;) Anyway, we managed to find a small tent for us at 600 rupees per night. We took two safaris there, one in the afternoon and one in the morning. Although the afternoon safari went in vain (in the sense that we could not see any tiger), the morning safari made it possible. The guide is the second safari was a bit more experienced than the first one. He followed the warning calls from spotted deer and sambar deer and lead us to spot the tiger. The tiger quietly came and crossed our roads. We felt so lucky to see it in the very second safari, people don't see tiger there even after taking 4-5 safaris. The park is spread over an area of 392 square km and there are only around 30 tigers. So the probability of spotting a tiger in a 3-hour long safari is quite low. Apart from tiger, we saw many birds (which we already saw in Bharatpur), crocodiles, deers, antilope etc.

Area-wise Rajathan is the largest state in India, and of course it's not possible to cover everything within just few days. There are many more interesting places like Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Ajmer which we could not cover. Will have to plan some trip again to this awesome Indian state in near future :)

DAE Symposium Jaipur

DAE symposium 2010 was in Jaipur this time as I had mentioned earlier. It was held in a brand new institute called L N Mittal Institute of Information Technology (LNMIIT), around 17 km away from the main city. The institute campus was really cool, and the organizers also did a great job I believe with the arrangement of food, accommodations etc. There were two things I did not like about the campus: it is located in a very deserted place away from the city and the campus has too many flies which keep annoying you in the lecture halls as well as in the dining room. The symposium brought many old friends together, it was really nice for me to be in a conference where more than half of the participants are known. Most of them, I met in various other schools in the last few years. This symposium was also very exciting for me since it was the first time I gave a talk in a conference. Although I was a little bit nervous, but my talk went quite well. Each day of the conference was divided into two sessions: one for plenary talks and the other for parallel sessions. The invited speakers for plenary talks were well-known experts in their respective fields and it was really great listening to them, particularly the talks by Sandip Trivedi, A Joshipura and others. Anyway it was a great academic experience for me. The non-academic experiences of Jaipur will follow this post shortly ;-)