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 :)