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 :)

A few Updates!

Well, quite a few updates to be precise. That's natural when one is away from the blogosphere for a long time. Lots of things happened since my last post, not all of them worth mentioning of course. The most important of them perhaps is my new affiliation and job. Yes, as I mentioned earlier, my PhD life ended on June 30, 2012 as scheduled without taking any extensions. And thankfully, I dint have to roam around jobless for a long time. I got an offer from a central government university in Tezpur, a small town in the Indian state Assam. Though I was supposed to join HRI, Allahabad sometime in July as a postdoctoral fellow, this offer from Tezpur University came as a big surprise. Being a fresh graduate, I applied there with zero expectation but with a good reason (as the University is just 30 km away from my Home). Also, I did know that its the best University in the North Eastern region of India and the education system is not too different from the IIT's. I am not much sure how different life would have been if I had gone to HRI rather than coming to Tezpur. But one difference is for sure: in Allahabad I would been crossing the river Ganges everyday whereas here I am crossing the Brahmaputra everyday ;-)

Anyways, life is quite enjoyable here in Tezpur specially after I got a campus residence few days back. I hardly feel like being away from my alma mater IIT Bombay. But of course the difference is severe if one goes outside the Tezpur University campus and that of IIT Bombay which for me is not of any concern as I never got addicted to typical city life in Bombay or any other cities. I have been teaching Electromagnetic Theory to MSc first year and General Theory of Relativity to MSc second year. Plus I have to take BTech Physics tutorials sometimes and have to guide an MSc second year project student. Yes, its quite hectic for a beginner as it sounds! But, same load will be on a postdoctoral fellow also in any good research institute. So, I have nothing to complain either to my employer or to myself. It's true (obviously) that teaching load slows down individual research quite a lot. That's the only thing which concerns me most here. I hope I will be able to complement this by visiting some good places whenever my university allows me. Recently, I visited ICTP for the workshop on BEhind NEutrino mass and mixing (BENE) which turned out to be a really good experience with almost all the big shots in this field from all around the world delivering some enlightening talks.I listened to so many talks on discrete flavor symmetries there that I have started liking some of them now, though discrete symmetries always looked very unnatural and ugly to me while I was a PhD student. I am planning to visit Aizawl, Mizoram next month for another conference and perhaps DAE symposium also which will be in January at Shantiniketan, West Bengal.

Hope to post some more updates soon, Cheers!

Last few days of PhD life!

The very title of this post is enough to explain my disappearance from the blogosphere for more than four months or so. PhD life has always been fun until recently. I don't even remember now how many trips I made during last four years for attending schools, workshops, conference as well as for picnic, trekking, wildlife etc. May be the distance I have traveled will be close to the one from Earth to Moon ;-) But finally, the fun-time was over and it was time to do some serious work to finish PhD. With just a few months at hand, it was really scary. The most hectic thing was applying for postdocs, arranging recommendation letters, writing thesis etc which often took me away from the research works I had been involved. And, at the end of the day all these efforts went in vain except for an offer in India. Although there are good people in India to work with, the salary of a postdoc is just four thousand rupees ($80) more than the monthly scholarship of a PhD student and with a bonus of more than double the workload. If I had enough time at hand, I would have probably chosen another PhD life than the poor life of a postdoc in India. Anyways, my time in Montreal is almost over, I have many things to update about life and work in Montreal, hopefully I will do that after returning to India next week!

In search of Good Music

Music has always been so close to my heart, but I never thought the power of music could be so immense. I heard of revolutionary singers like Bob Marley, Paul Robson but this time I could witness the power of music in my own beloved state Assam. Yes, I am talking about the sad demise of Dr Bhupen Hazarika around three weeks back. When his dead body reached Guwahati, the whole city turned into an ocean of humanity, a scene which our generation has never seen in real life. My dad and his generation might have become very nostalgic about the six year old Assam Agitation in the eighties when such ocean of humanity was visible in many parts of the state, not just a city. Around five million people paid their last tribute to Dr Hazarika, no one from my state has ever got such respect and probably no one will in the next hundred years or so. Bhupen da's songs were not very popular among the kids during my days, we were more inclined towards those kind of music where fancy instruments like electric guitar, drum etc are used. But it did not take a long time till I realized the beauty of Bhupen da's heart touching composition and more importantly his lyrics. His lyrics were all about the story of the native people, the songs really appealed to the people to bring peace and harmony in an otherwise violence/insurgency hit area like Assam. Even a thousand page book will be insufficient to talk about his music, forget about a single blog post.

Just before I started writing this post, I was just wondering and worrying about "what next?". No doubt Bhupen da's music will be in our heart forever, but who will carry forward his ideologies to the next generation? who will create such beautiful music again? Are we going to lose the traditional folk music and get into the modernized commercial ones ? Who will carry the legacy of Late Ghazal maestro Jagjit Singh ? It's a matter of serious concern not just because there are not enough people who are trying to create such compositions, also because the recent trend among the youth who nowadays go to a rock concert to promote bhangra(traditional Punjabi dance) and spread hooliganism. Media in this country is already sold to the politicians and corporates, so they always keep promoting the commercial music, never let the real Indian traditional, classical and folk music a chance to come into the limelight. I have respect for all languages, castes, traditions in India, but at the same time I find it so insane to see the whole country promoting a song with crappy lyrics, written in some deformed version of English and with very ordinary music. I am not just sick of the facebook shares I see everyday, but also the newspaper articles. Whenever the song crosses n'th million views (n is a positive integer) in youtube, there comes a new article in the newspaper. If this is what shows the current trend/taste of music then undoubtedly I will not see any future Bhupen da, Jagjit Singh in my life.

Yet, some people are trying to make a difference, they haven't given up yet. For example MTV coke studio and more recently The Dewarists are trying to bring out the real Indian music to the world. It's so amazing to see such innovative shows in Indian Televisions. They are not just bringing the folk, traditional music from various parts of India, but also trying to create a fusion among them, its really amazing. I never could imagine of a fusion between Assam and Tamil Nadu in terms of music until I saw it in MTV Coke Studio. The Dewarists has some other motivations too, apart from music it is also promoting tourism, food from various parts of India. Their episode 6 of season 1 was about Rabbi Shergill from Punjab and Papon from Assam, they put these two singers together in the midst of wild, open, charismatic Kaziranga national park and assign them the job of composing a song about the God of openness (Khule da Rabb). It was so amazing, the video of the song is here (http://youtu.be/5vg9D2wQ9pA). Story of Rabbi is very inspiring as he said in his interview, it was so difficult for him to come up with something so unique and off-track stuff which probably had no chance of commercialization. But he still came up with his own version of music providing a Punjabi sufi flavor to us. Story of Papon is different though, looking at the fact that he was borne in a place where people appreciate folk music more and also in a family of very popular singer. I really liked when Rabbi said, he loves North East because people there don't easily give up their identity. I hope Rabbi's statement about North East will be a message to the entire country so as to keep our traditional music alive. Kudos to MTV Coke Studio, The Dewarists and all those who still believe in India's traditional identity and doing their best to revive it through music.

SUSY11 at Fermilab

Attending SUSY 2011 conference at Fermilab this year was an awesome experience, thanks to department of science and technology (India) and IIT Bombay for providing the necessary financial support. My trip to Chicago was surprisingly very good, I never expected such a good service in Air India. Last year I had very bad experience with Air India flight to London. But this time either they have improved a lot, or may be they provide superior service in the Delhi-Chicago flight. Anyway, I reached O'Hare airport in the morning of 27th August, and it was surprisingly very hot. May be Chicago is like that only during summer. I took a cab to a place near Fermilab where my accommodation was booked. The taxi driver was a funny guy who thought I was from Italy. The place is quite far from the main city and I had to spend around 90 USD to get there. It's a country of the rich after all, no good public transport available. I forgot to mention a great coincidence: I found three known people in the Delhi-Chicago flight one of whom came for the same SUSY conference and the other two had a connecting flight to somewhere else!

Fermilab is a really nice place with a beautiful surroundings. The conference was nicely organized, specially the welcome dinner and the tevatron celebration party was really awesome with unlimited drinks. The only thing which I was worrying about also went well without any trouble. Yes, I am talking about my talk. Thanks to the audience in the parallel session for not screwing it up ;-). The people were more or less depressed because of two things. The tevatron shut down and the LHC results shown in Lepton Photon 2011 conference held in the previous week. But there were lots of optimist and enthusiast as well who will never give up. It was really a memorable experience to be there.

Since Fermilab is located at a very boring place and I couldn't afford to hire a car, I could not explore anything about the place. However one funny thing I noticed was the name of various small towns and villages which resemble so much with those in Europe. For example, the nearest railway station was in a place called Geneva. It was funny that I went to Fermilab in USA and while returning from fermilab to the city I had to take a train from Geneva. Ironically, Fermilab's rival laboratory CERN is located in Geneva, Switzerland. I spend two days in Chicago. It's a beautiful city full of lots of tourists. And I was there during a weekend luckily and could see couple of functions, festivals etc. Chicago jazz festival was also going on that time. The Michigan lake which look like an ocean is really amazing. I kept walking along the lakeside most of the time, the view of the lake with the huge skyscrapers in the background is really amazing. I could in fact identify most of the buildings shown in the recent Transformer movie. It was a great experience indeed.

Back to Blogosphere!

It's been two and a half months I have neither posted anything new nor have opened my blog webpage. I was occupied with too many not-so-interesting activities like applying for visa, applying for financial assistance to attend a conference. The slow and inefficient Indian bureaucracy made me spend lots of time running here and there for some stupid things. Specially the hectic American visa procedures really kill your time and peace of mind. Anyway, I could have talked about many things in the last two months like my visit to Fermilab for the SUSY 2011 conference, my short trip to home, my recent arXiv paper(1109.3363) which I submitted in a hurry fearing that LHC would soon throw the paper into trash, my trip to New Delhi to celebrate my birthday and finally about my newly started life in Montreal, Canada. I will post about some of these (if not all) shortly!