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!

The Happiest Moment!

What can be the happiest moment in a research scholar's life? Well, for me its when I get reply to my mails from my supervisor :P. Today I got reply from my supervisor after a long time regarding some calculations I have done related to gauge coupling unification in some specific models. Thank god he found them quite good. Although the unification in my calculations are still partial, effort is going on to make them perfect may be at the cost of adding some new particles. But the good thing is that the I am getting unification near $ 10^{16} $ GeV (which is allowed from proton decay constraints) with a low intermediate breaking scale of the order of TeV. This looks good as it can have some LHC signatures. Lets see how things go, I am really hopeful of some good output unlike before :)

CSIR NET

Today the CSIR NET result came out, and to my surprise I cracked it. I don't know what to say, but one thing for sure: this is the easiest competitive examination in India probably. I appeared it with almost zero preparation, attempted 50 percent in paper I and 75 percent in paper II and still I got rank 70. Wow...sounds cool, isn't it? The examination was in December last year, I was busy with my semester activities till November end, then went to Guwahati for ten days, came back to Bombay just one week before the NET examination, revised some of my MSc syllabus. And the way we went to appear the exam in Pune was like going for a picnic. We were six together and most of us had no preparation at all. Anyway it was fun. Although this JRF will not be useful for me practically but it will certainly be a tag in my CV :)

Oscar winners!

I watched Hurt Locker two days back. Never heard of it before it got the best motion picture award. Avatar got so much hype this time that all other movies remained quite unknown till the Oscar night. I have a copy of Avatar with me for last 3 months but haven't yet watched it. Hurt Locker was a nice movie based on the life of American soldiers in terror and war hit Iraq. Although the story is not so great but the movie has a good flow, I did not feel bored at any point. Unlike masala movies like Slumdog Millionaire which I still cant believe to be the best motion picture last year, movies like Hurt Locker never get much media attention. I also watched Inglourious Basterds day on Friday night. Christoph Waltz truly deserves the best supporting role award he got. The movie was also good, I just wish Hitler were killed in real life like the way those basterds kill him in the movie along with all senior nazi officers inside a cinema hall in Paris, it would have saved thousands lives. I am planning to watch Crazy Heart today which got the best male actor award, planning to get a copy of The Blind State for which Sandra Bullock got the best female actor award.

A very unusual weekend indeed!

This weekend has started in a very unusual way for me. I used to sleep till 12 or 1 pm during weekends, but today I got up at 7:20 am and went to watch the 8:45 am show of Love, Sex and Dhoka (a hindi movie released yesterday) in a multiplex nearby. It sounds odd, but the reason behind this compromise with good sleep is to save hundred rupees. The morning show tickets cost just 45 bucks. The movie is a low budget one with no known actors in it. But still it was a good entertainer. The movie is based on three different stories with a very tiny link in between, the first one was not so great and has a very sad and brutal end, however the second and third one were funny. The details can be found in standard movie reviews which I don't need to repeat here. However, I wont recommend anyone to spend 150 bucks on it, but it does worth 45 at least :P

Trip to Bombay

I had a short trip to Bombay last weekend. But the main goal of the visit was not achieved. I planned to go there to meet a prof. but I came to know just one day before my trip that the prof wont be having time to talk to me. But still I did not cancel my trip since I made some other plans like meeting some friends, my sister and to bring some stuffs from Bombay which I don't find in Ahmedabad easily :P . The journey was pretty good, did not feel the scorching heat of summer as it was overnight journey. I reached my IITB hostel at around 7 am in the morning, had my favorite H13 breakfast. I wanted to download at least 100 GB entertainment stuffs from the LAN there, but unfortunately the "search" option in my dc++ was disabled and I had to look into every single user's shared items to look for the things I needed. I did not have much time as I had to leave the campus by 1 pm to go to meet some friends and cousins. But still I could download some 30 GB stuffs which would be okay for at least one month :P The weather in Bombay was very humid as well as hot, I found it more irritating than Ahmedabad even where its hot but not humid. One more interesting thing about the trip was that there was a girl whose seat was just next to me while going to Bombay, and the same girl had the seat eight position next to me while coming back, a great coincidence for me at least. I could also manage to bring some stuffs which could have put me into trouble, but thank god managed somehow, you know what I mean right?

Ocean of leptogenesis

For the last few days I have been trying to learn various models of leptogenesis, the mechanism of producing a lepton-antilepton asymmetry in the early Universe. When I searched for keyword "leptogenesis" in SPIRES, it returned around 750 papers. Thank God I did not give up and dared to look into the list in search of some pioneering papers with maximum citations. I was more surprised by the number of various types of leptogenesis mechanism than the huge number of papers. Before I thought it can happen only by the decays of heavy neutrinos. But there are plenty of other scenarios: like Higgs triplet decay in type 2 seesaw mechanism, resonant leptogenesis which arises from two quasi-degenerate heavy neutrinos, supersymmetric leptogenesis, electromagnetic leptogenesis, gravitational leptogenesis and many others. I am just wondering is there any other type of leptogenesis exist which no one has considered yet. I never could imagine this to be such a vast field. I don't know what I am capable of doing in this field or what new thing is there for me to tell the world about it, but the subject is pretty interesting. After all, it addresses one of the very important issues in physics: why we see only matter around us and not anti-matter? Its very unlikely that the Universe was created with a matter-antimatter asymmetry. Thus if there were equal proportion of matter and antimatter in the early Universe then why don't we see anti-galaxies, anti-planets or may be anti-human around us? ........Leptogenesis will give you the answer!!