Pirates of the Dirac Sea

Science Camp, Cultivation, City of Joy etc!

2014-11-13T12:54:00.000+05:30

Hello everyone on Blogosphere. It seems like a decade I am away from this blog except to those who are in space or in Miller's planet (courtesy: Interstellar). Coming back here was not a compulsion by the way, but a reflection of the fact that I have been living some beautiful days since November 9 in the city of Joy, Calcutta. The best part of these few days was the freedom I was awarded to do whatever I want which is rare in a government job. I am indeed thankful to my official as well as practical hosts in this city as well as to my university for sending me here. I came here on duty leave taking our students to the National Science Camp held during November 10-12 at Science City here. Although the organizers sent me a hard copy of invitation letter, they simply denied accommodation to me after my arrival, thanks to the lack of communication between national and local organizers. Although they took good care of our students, I had to roam here and there before somehow managing to get into the IACS guest house. Thanks to all who helped me out and gave me a place to stay at night within such a short notice and that too on a weekend. Although the trip to Calcutta started like this, it took off very smoothly as I could utilize my day time reading and discussing things at IACS theoretical physics department. I felt as if I am reading some new science after a long long time. The hectic teaching and administrative work schedule at my workplace hardly allow me to do something creative or read something new. Days were fun with science, whereas the evenings were fun with tasting new food with friends at places like Tandoor Park (Jadavpur), South City Mall (Jadavpur), Peter Cat (Park Street) etc. Visiting the Victoria Memorial at night was simply amazing, such a mesmerizing structure. My stay here also allowed me to watch the new movie Interstellar released last week. This would have never been possible in a small town like Tezpur where I work. Before leaving tonight, just thanking everyone who made my stay comfortable and enjoyable. Also a big thanks to the National Science Camp organizers who could not offer me a place to stay but finally paid for my stay at a place which I am sure is better than anything the organizers would have offered. Adios City of Joy, hope to visit again!

NCTP 2013 at Tezpur University

2013-02-06T20:26:00.000+05:30

The Physics Department of Tezpur University is organizing National Conference on Theoretical Physics 2013 during February 8-12, 2013 (http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/events/nctp12.pdf). This was supposed to happen during October, 2012 but some unavoidable circumstances led to the postponement. In spite of this unfortunate postponement, NCTP 2013 is going to host around hundred participants from different parts of the country including thirteen invited speakers. The topics covered in the invited as well as contributed talks cover almost every area of theoretical physics. Invited speakers include Prof. Amitava Raychaudhuri (Calcutta University), Prof. D P Roy (TIFR), Prof. Rajeev Bhalerao (TIFR), Prof. Raj Gandhi (HRI), Prof. Jayant Murthy (IIA), Prof. Pushpa Khare (IUCAA), Prof. Vinod Krishan (RRI), Prof. Nikhil Chakraborty (SINP), Prof. M. Khan (Jadavpur Univ), Prof. D. K. Choudhury (Gauhati Univ), Prof. N. N. Singh (Gauhati Univ), Prof. Amarjyoti Choudhury (Tezpur Univ) and Prof. S. Ghosh (IIG, Mumbai). The conference is going to take off day after tomorrow with the keynote address by Prof Amitava Raychaudhuri in the afternoon (at 16:30 hrs). From Saturday onwards the technical sessions on Astrophysics, Cosmology, Neutrino Physics, Plasma Physics, Hadron Physics, Computational Physics will start. I hope the participants will find this conference to be of great scientific importance with a pleasant stay at Tezpur.

Adios 2012!

2013-01-02T20:19:00.000+05:30

2012 indeed was great (to me at least), not just because the world didn't end on 21st December but for several other reasons, mostly academic though. The year took off while I was in the awesome city of Montreal, Canada. Although it was very cold, watching the snowfall and tasting so many different varieties of wines from different countries were something which made my stay there memorable. I got learn some new physics and could finish some parts of the project before leaving. The most hectic part during the first couple of months of 2012 was to write thesis and apply for postdoc positions. The job market scene was so poor that even after applying for around 40 odd positions trough AJO, I didn't get any positive response. After coming back to India in March, I submitted my thesis in the month of April without too much editing, but thankfully it didn't have to go through too many corrections after reviewer's comments came. I am thankful to the anonymous referee for reviewing my thesis just on time. That enabled my institute to hold my defense just on the deadline (a week before the convocation) and my degree was awarded in the 50th convocation of IIT Bombay. Although I could not attend convocation, getting both Masters and PhD degree was really really huge for me. Another gift from 2012 was the central government job I got in Tezpur University where I am working now. That was a big relief after so many postdoc rejections. It was also like a dream coming true that I got a job in my home state Assam and that too in Tezpur which is just 25 kilometer from my home. I also made my second trip to ICTP for the BENE 2012 workshop, participated in the TeVPA 2012 conference in Mumbai. Not just me, 2012 was a great year for Physics in general. Discovery of Higgs boson at LHC, measurement of non zero reactor mixing angle are undoubtedly the most remarkable things happened in the science this year. I hope similar excitements would continue in the year 2013 as well, may not be from LHC which wont have any proton proton collisions until 2015, but from other experimental frontiers as well related to dark matter, neutrinos and many more. Happy New Year 2013 to all of us!

First In-House Symposium at Physics Department, TU

2012-12-21T18:38:00.002+05:30

It was a great day for Physics department of Tezpur University. On the last day of Mayan calender, we organized our first ever in-house symposium. The aim of this symposium was to get familiarize with the works being done in the department by various groups, both experimental as well as theoretical. Since, it was a one day program, we had to stick to just one talk from one group (either by a faculty member or by a research scholar). The program was co-funded by Intellectual Property Rights cell at TU and the inaugural speech was delivered on IPR by an invited speaker. Rest of the day was all about four different sessions (3-4 talks each) followed by poster session by all the research scholars. The event was pretty smooth and we all had a great day for sure. I got reminded of SYMPHY, the in-house symposium we used to organize at IIT Bombay every year. One generic issue which I observed in SYMPHY as well as in today's event is that people get too technical in their talks showing too many plots, technical details and all. That's encouraging for those who are familiar with that particular field, but could yawning for others. May be we should come up with a guideline from next time requesting the speakers to give an overview of the field highlighting the basics as well as theoretical/practical importance so that swallowing it becomes easier for all. Otherwise only few people in the audience will be listening. Good thing about our initiative is that the administration has decided to make such in-house symposium mandatory in all TU departments. Such a practice is very common in well established institutes like IIT Bombay, its really good that a relatively younger department is following those footsteps. Hope this continues every year in future and bring in more collaboration and ideas.

Another Milestone for the SM!

2012-12-21T18:08:00.001+05:30

The standard model (SM) of particle physics has crossed another milestone as reported by LHCb collaboration at the recent hadron collider physics symposium held in Kyoto. They have done an incredible measurement of B meson decaying into muon anti-muon pairs. However, people started using this SM milestone as a bullet in SUSY's chest. BBC reported LHCb UK spokesperson saying, "SUSY might not be dead yet, but these results have certainly put her into hospital". And this statement was enough to spark off a debate in the blogosphere followed by couple of arXiv pre-prints. Well, its true that no sign of new physics in this measurement is disappointing, but it amazes me that SUSY has suffered the most whereas there are plenty of other beyond standard model frameworks in the market. I could see three different types of reactions : SUSY is dead or in hospital, SUSY is less natural than thought and SUSY is still alive or in good health. The first reaction is of course a bit harsh and extreme but probably was good for many others who have come up with pre-prints showing available parameter space (natural parameter space probably, I am confused though what to call natural nowadays) which exactly fit these observations. Even if we collect as much data as we want, they will probably never justify the first reaction and at the worst case will leave us with a situation which is a linear combination of the second two reactions.

Should have written a paper on it already ;-)

2012-11-11T15:21:00.002+05:30

Like most of the experimental anomalies and surprises, the Fermi 130 GeV line has also come under dark shadows recently (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22466-doubt-cast-on-fermis-dark-matter-smoking-gun.html). It's not that I believed the dark matter interpretation of this line too much, but I still thought this would survive at least for a year ;) This so called game of town in particle astrophysics was initiated by Weniger in April 2012 with a detailed analysis of the publicly available Fermi-LAT data. This was followed by a series of papers from theorists with many well motivated models explaining the origin of this 130 GeV monochromatic line which apparently does not seem to have any obvious astrophysical origin. As the above link to the article in New Scientist says, the Fermi collaboration hasn't denied the presence of this peak in their data, but the dark matter origin of this line is in doubt as the same line is present even when the Fermi detector is pointed towards earth rather than the galactic center (where dark matter is more abundant). Hope Fermi collaboration would soon come up with an official publication telling us more about it. It won't be too much of a surprise if this goes away like B meson anomalies at DO/CDF went away in the wake of LHC results or the phantom of OPERA disappeared after the loose cable connection was found. Nevertheless, one obvious and immediate advantage of these anomalies is that theorists get a chance to write couple of more papers trying to fit their favorite theory or model with the data. Anyways, as someone pointed out correctly at the BENE workshop at ICTP, Trieste two months back, models don't get killed, they sometimes die out of starvation ;-) So even if future Fermi-LAT analysis kills the dark matter interpretation of this interesting gamma ray line, all the models used to explain it already are still in safe heaven. Vive Le Model-Building!

PS: For more information on this doubt cast on Fermi gamma ray line, see RESONANCE blog post!

Looking for a common theme of work!

2012-11-05T19:19:00.000+05:30

Pursuing research in an academic institute or university in India is not easy with so much teaching load as well as other administrative works. And probably that's the reason why most of the good research in India are carried out in special research institutes or laboratories where the teaching load is almost zero. This is quite a different picture compared to universities/institutes in other countries (developed ones, in particular) where most of the research output comes from universities. I don't know whom to blame for the poor research conditions of Indian universities, but hopefully the situation will change slowly with the central government authorities seem to be taking a series of initiatives. Anyways, without going further into the blame game, the best way is to make maximum use of the existing system and produce maximum possible quality output. In the physics department of Tezpur University (http://www.tezu.ernet.in/dphy/) where I work, there are around 16 faculty members working in different areas like nano-physics, astrophysics, high energy physics etc. The experimental people are comparatively more active in research as they have a large number of research students under their supervision as well as good number of equipments. Whereas, the members of the theory people do not have many students under them and so is the number of publications. Recently, we have decided to choose a common theme for the theory people so that the theory people can work together on it with a long run perspective. That should hopefully take some load of an individual faculty who do not have the "eligibility" yet to take students under him/her. Here "eligibility" doesn't refer to intellectual eligibility of course, but the "eligibility" criteria defined by the system here which I neither try to justify nor ridicule. But, choosing a common theme of work is not as easy as it may sound, since almost all of us had worked on quite different things during doctoral research. But looking at the fact that the present era is the era of inter-disciplinary research with people explaining condensed matter problems using theory of gravity (just an example), the possible options for such a theme should not be a scarcity.

The expertise the theory people here have are mainly neutrino physics, hadron physics, cosmology, astrophysics/astronomy and plasma physics. As a first trial, we are thinking of considering the problem of dark matter as a common theme (yet to be decided though). Since this is a huge research area, the general feeling is that it should touch upon the field of expertise of each one of us to some extent at least. To go ahead with this theme, it was necessary to highlight some of the interesting and recent things happening in this area to the members since not all of us are actively working on it. I gave an overview seminar on dark matter starting with astrophysical hints like galaxy rotation curve, bullet cluster, structure formation and then going into some details of particle characteristics of dark matter, direct/indirect experimental evidence highlighting many recent anomalies (130 GeV Fermi-LAT line for example) which indirectly point towards the existence of dark matter. Of course, in my ways of looking at this problem, the knowledge of particle physics would be very important to find out the dark matter abundance, its cross section with nuclei in direct detection experiments, the cross section for producing gamma rays or other stuff which we treat as indirect evidence of dark matter etc. One of my colleague here (who specializes in UV astronomy, high energy astrophysics) gave a follow up seminar bringing up an astrophysics problem which could be linked to dark matter in some ways which I do not understand yet. It's about the Missing Baryon problem. This is about the fraction of baryons predicted by big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) which remain unobserved (about 30% if I am not wrong). Initially I thought this is similar to the Missing Satellite problem which is generic in cold dark matter scenarios which predict more number of satellite galaxies in the clusters which are not observed. Missing Satellite problem can be fixed in scenarios of warm dark matter or non-thermal production of dark matter scenarios well studied in the literature. But this missing baryon problem seems to be different as my colleague says. Its independent of cold or warm dark matter scenarios. Its hard to understand from theory point of view, where those baryons could have gone. Certainly they cant decay into something else, may be BBN scenario has to be modified, but that's also tricky as BBN is one of the very successful predictions of big bang cosmology. I got a Nature news today (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v490/n7418/full/490008b.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20121004) which talks about a paper claiming that the missing baryons have been spotted in the X-ray data. If confirmed, it would imply that the missing baryons are not exactly missing but just were not being detected somehow. Anyways, it might be too early to settle this mystery and more future data analysis like this group would be needed.

Upcoming Conferences Dec-Jan 2012-13

2012-10-30T23:21:00.000+05:30

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...

2012-10-18T11:15:00.000+05:30

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!

2012-10-02T14:55:00.000+05:30

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!

2012-03-07T04:29:00.002+05:30

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

2011-11-27T00:46:00.005+05:30

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

2011-10-30T04:05:00.002+05:30

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!

2011-10-30T03:35:00.003+05:30

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!

এটি অকবিতা

2011-08-15T02:43:00.005+05:30

কেতিয়াবা কবিতা লিখিবলৈও মন যায়,
এনে এক কবিতা যি তোমাৰ বুকুত প্ৰেমৰ কঠিয়া সিঁচে,
কিন্তু দুৰ্ভিক্ষত আক্ৰান্ত এই হৃদয়ে আজি শব্দ বিচাৰি কৰিছে হাহাকাৰ,
শুনা পাইছানে তুমি সেই হৃদয়ৰ আৰ্তনাদ ?
শুনা পালে পঠাবা মোলৈ শব্দৰ এজাক বৰষুণ
মোৰ হৃদয়তো গজালি মেলিব কবিতাই
তোমালৈ বুলি কবিতা লিখিম
তোমাক ভাল পাবলৈ শিকিম.........

Independence Day!

2011-08-08T15:34:00.002+05:30

15th August is approaching, and India is going to celebrate her 65th Independence day. The country, although got freedom from the British rule in 1947, is yet to get freedom from many other things: poverty, illiteracy, insurgency, unemployment, corruption, illegal immigration are few of them. Specially the people of rural India are yet to understand what independence or freedom actually means. Situation is even worse in North East(NE) India, an alien land to rest of India as well as the central government. All the above listed parasites are there in this part of land since the day India got her freedom. The step motherly attitude of the central government as well as the lack of good leaders from this region are possibly the main reasons why NE, a paradise on earth so to say, has always been affected by the above mentioned problems. There are huge number of articles or books related to NE India and its problems which I am not going to repeat here, neither I have studied enough to suggest effective solutions to all these issues. It's just that I feel very nostalgic as this day approaches. Although I have been outside NE India since 2003, yet I come to know from my family and friends there about the celebrations, fears, anxieties in the minds of people there as the Independence day approaches. Things have not changed there, Independence day means a holiday, a holiday of a different kind when people prefer to stay inside home, shop owners never open their shops and car owners never hit the streets. Few government officers come to their respective offices for flag hoisting amidst tight security. Even the Indian railways cancel their trains for around 1 week fearing attacks creating lots of problems for common people who have to travel everyday. I am sure most of the people would even wish if this 15th August day had never come to their lives, they would have probably lived a better life. I wonder how soon these things will change there, I haven't seen any change throughout my life but still hopeful of seeing some changes so that people can come out of their homes to celebrate Independence day without fear but with the pride of being an Indian. Jai Hind!

Physical Review has changed my opinion about peer review!

2011-08-08T14:59:00.003+05:30

Couple of months ago, I posted something expressing my anger and frustration about scientific peer review. I had a hard time then dealing with the referee's comments related to one of my papers. Sometimes referee suggest some more work, and after I actually do them and resubmit, the referee comes up with some other objections and reject the whole paper and the whole process cost me several months. Sometimes the situation is even worse. The editor responds like this: "One referee recommends publishing your paper and one referee doesn't. Hence I decide not to publish your paper." I am not kidding, this indeed happened with me. But after I started sending papers to Physical Review, my opinions about scientific peer review have changed. No matter they publish your article or not, the comments of criticism they send are really helpful. It helped me learn much beyond the content of my paper, and in some cases improved the quality of the paper by several times. Rejection on the basis of concrete justifications is never depressing, it is rather encouraging to do better. I have become a big fan of Physical Review now and would always prefer to send my articles to them without worrying too much about impact factors. But of course, I have not communicated with many other publishers, so can't comment on whether they will be better or worse than Physical Review in terms of reviewers comments.

1107.5438

2011-08-05T20:03:00.004+05:30

I am happy to be back in blogosphere after a gap of around one and a half months. There were too many things I was involved in related to the administrative branch of my home institute. Slow and inefficient Indian bureaucracy takes too much time to get things done, can't help it. Anyway, I am feeling quite blank regarding what to post. The easiest thing to post is about my latest paper which appeared in arxiv last week. The title of this post is the arxiv pre-print number of my article.

The paper titled as " Spontaneous Parity Breaking and Supersymmetry Breaking in Metastable Vacua with Consistent Cosmology" is all about study of some cosmological issues in a model where Left-Right symmetry can be broken spontaneously as well as Supersymmetry can be broken in a metastable vacua without any reference to hidden sectors (like in usual Supersymmetry breaking models) . Such a model was constructed recently by a Japanese group, we study it in details and point out some cosmological issues which needs to be addressed. The issue is related to the formation of domain walls (extended two dimensional topological objects) which are formed after the phase transition accompanying the discrete left right symmetry breaking. These domain walls have very high energy density compared to usual matter or radiation and if they start dominating the Universe, the standard cosmology will be in trouble in view of recent experimental data from WMAP (Wilkinson Mass Anisotropy Probe). We discussed some techniques to get rid of such unwanted walls in earlier works also and the basic idea is to incorporate gravitational effects which break the discrete symmetry explicitly leading to a pressure difference across the walls. Thus the true vacuum will expand and occupy the entire observable Universe. The model we are studying in this present paper is however different from earlier models in the sense that here both left right symmetry breaking and supersymmetry breaking mechanisms are specifically mentioned, that too without talking about hidden sectors. Such theories are based on Seiberg duality which relates a UV free supersymmetric gauge theory to an IR free magnetic theory thereby making computations easier in both the regimes. The magnetic theory , if assumed to describe the low energy world, also breaks Supersymmetry spontaneously. Supersymmetry preserving vacua also appear dynamically in the magnetic theory leading to metastable vacua. The work I have done, studied the constraints coming from such long lifetime of metastable vacua as well as domain wall disappearance in the left right symmetric model. The life time constraint gives a lower bound on the left right symmetry breaking scale whereas the domain wall disappearance puts an upper bound on that scale. Fortunately these bounds don't conflict each other and more excitingly the lower bound coming from long life time of metastable vacua requirement lies pretty close to the TeV scale. Anyway much more work needs to be done in these models and our work just tells a tiny part of it concerning mainly the domain wall disappearance!

Another Black Friday

2011-06-24T18:33:00.002+05:30

With the anti-corruption movement shaking the whole country, the Indian state Assam seems to be witnessing a lot more than that. Although corruption is a problem affecting the whole country, there are other serious problems (some of them are historic so to say) affecting North East India as well as Assam for a long time: sometimes due to the negligence of central government, sometimes due to the state government elected by our own people. Two days back there was a public protest led by Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) in the capital of Assam which turned violent claiming three lives including a minor. They were protesting the recent Assam government plan to evict thousands of Assamese people from hills and wetland areas around Guwahati. Surprisingly the government put up polling booths in all these areas during election. And after looting the public votes, now they are planning to turn them homeless. It should also be mentioned that the government has not taken any such steps so far to evict millions of illegal Bangladesh immigrants from various such government places including Kaziranga National Park.

Lots of public as well as private properties were destroyed, blame it on both the protesters as well as the government who did not take necessary measures. The role of police forces while those properties were destroyed also raises doubts in everyone's minds. They were just silent spectators and did not make any effort to stop it. Around 170 private vehicles were damaged and 2-3 city buses were put on fire in the incident. While KMSS has denied such destruction of public properties, the government is blaming the protesters, specially their leader as well as RTI activist Akhil Gogoi for this. But the role of police force while the properties were destroyed forces one to doubt whether this was a conspiracy by the government itself to put Akhil Gogoi behind bars. They tried to do it before the election also blaming Akhil Gogoi of violating election protocol, but had to release him within hours due to public protests. Today, the government has done the same mistake again by sending him to custody for three days. Already public protests have started at various places in Assam, specially Guwahati. People have blocked national highways, the streets have become deserted with shops, offices closing down. Hope this protest won't turn as violent as the one two days back. Assam might have witnesses hundreds of such black Fridays, but nothing has changed. Forget about such day or month long protests, even the six year long Assam agitation could not fulfill it's sole purpose and both the public as well as the government are responsible for this. Like we were betrayed by the government before, now also there is no good reason to expect something better, but hope the public will act in a matured manner this time onwards both in electing a government as well as raising voice against anything which threaten their existence and make them homeless in their own soil.

Alternative ways to fight against corruption?

2011-06-14T15:53:00.004+05:30

With the recent movement in India led by Anna Hazare and others against corruption, there have been mixed reactions from the people of India. Although I have seen very few who are doubting Anna Hazare and his crusade against corruption calling them unconstitutional and all, it is worth looking into any alternative way(if any) in the minds of these people to bring the corruption down in India. Anna team are putting pressure on the government to implement the Jan Lokpal bill which will bring an autonomous body called Lokpal into existence. This will handle everything like speedy probe, trials and awarding punishments to the culprits without asking the government. I don't know why people are opposing this move? I have not seen any strong reason from anyone why Lokpal is not going to work. Most of the people who are complaining it seems, are not a fan of the way Anna is pressurizing the government. I would request them to suggest an alternative way. And even if there is an alternative, let Anna and his team fight in the way they prefer. After all they learned it from Gandhi, the father of the nation. Before independence also, people did not agree with each other in their ways to fight against the British. And they indeed fought in different ways, although the whole credit went to Gandhi and his followers only. So this time also, it's perfectly alright if someone think he or she does not believe in Anna's way. May he(she) fight in his(her) preferred way. As long as people support the cause (which is fight against corruption now) and choose their own way to fight for it, the solution will come in one way or the other. But just criticizing the Anna and his team (which now the Congress led government is doing to save their own political leaders who will be nowhere is Lokpal come to existence) is not enough, people should come up with proper logic why they think Anna's crusade is wrong and also suggest alternative ways to fight against corruption if they at all think corruption is a big problem India is facing nowadays.

Where is this country heading for?

2011-06-08T12:19:00.002+05:30

The kind of things happening in this country (India of course) in past few months are really shameful. With the multi-billion dollar scams coming into light and sending the culprits like Raja, Kanimozhi, Kalmadi etc to jail, the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare and later by Ramdev and all have gained a new momentum recently. The way the government has used brutal police force against the peaceful protesters in Ramlila maidan, New Delhi has in fact increased the momentum of the anti-corruption movement with every possible party, organization (except Congress) condemning it. The Congress led government seem to be playing a dual role: they accept the Jan lokpal bill demand of Anna Hazare team on one hand and on the other hand they order heavy crackdown on Ramdev led peaceful protesters. Their recent action has forced all of us to doubt whether the govt is serious at all about the Jan Lokpal Bill which if come into play will leave no room for the corrupted leaders and bureaucrats. Congress seem to be afraid of this bill a lot as many big leaders of the ruling government have been sent to jail already and if this bill becomes operational, may be all of the Congress leaders will be sent to jail. Unable to fight against the mass supporters of anti corruption movement, they government is now taking this issue personally against the leaders like Ramdev by putting income-tax, CBI behind him to probe some issues claimed by the government. The government is even claiming the aide of Ramdev to be a Nepalese criminal and trying to probe how he managed to get an Indian passport. The same Congress government however issue Indian voter ID's to millions of Bangladeshi immigrants who illegally infiltrate into Indian territory. It's unfortunate to see that the opposition parties like BJP are not taking full advantage of such a situation to fight against the Congress led government and their atrocities on innocent people. Even self-acclaimed common men's friend Rahul Gandhi seems to have disappeared instead of raising his Italian origin voice against the inhuman crackdown on the innocent people. He was shouting a lot recently for the Uttar Pradesh farmers against the land acquisition by the Mayawati led government in Uttar Pradesh. But now, when the same kind of situation has arisen sponsored by Congress although, he is silent. This clearly shows how fake Rahul Gandhi and his activities are. Hope the youth of this nation will stop calling him an idol of this country or future Prime Minister of this country or similar bullshits. Anyway, as long as we, the citizens or India are united against corruption, we do not need any false sympathies of people like Rahul Gandhi. Hope this movement turns into a revolution in this country and bring food, cloth and home to the millions of poor instead of increasing the Swiss bank account balance of Politicians.

Monsoon 2011

2011-06-05T11:28:00.002+05:30

Season's first rain has finally arrived on June 2nd in the city of Bombay giving the much needed relief from the scorching heat and humidity. Although full fledged monsoon is going to arrive only after June 10th, these pre-monsoon showers are serving a good purpose as well. First rain brings a festive mood to the people of any Indian city I guess, a festive spirit beyond religious boundaries where everyone just come out of their home, office to celebrate by getting drenched in the rain. Although the first rain of the season could be dangerous to get drenched in, yet nobody seems to care about that. Being from Assam, where rain comes very often I am not so much enthusiastic although to go out and get drenched, but yet I love rain a lot, I always keep looking forward to it, it reminds me of my home, my childhood...it feels just awesome. In most parts of India, rain brings an end to the depressing brownish look of the hills, forests and covers them with a fresh green envelope. I know, it sounds exactly opposite to most of Europe where rain brings depression ;-) My landlord in Munich, Germany went crazy when I told him that Indians love rain a lot and we welcome it with immense pleasure. Anyway hope rain lasts longer this time, keeping Bombay cool and enjoyable :)

1105.5006

2011-05-26T15:47:00.004+05:30

The title of this post refers to the pre-print of my paper which appeared in arxiv.org today. It's about domain wall formation in spontaneous R-parity breaking models and one possible way to get rid of them by introducing gravity induced higher dimensional operators. Before I go one step further may be I should say something about various technical terms appearing in the last sentence. Domain walls are two dimensional objects which are formed whenever a discrete symmetry gets spontaneously broken. They have a finite topological charge and hence are stable. In our work, this discrete symmetry is the left-right symmetry under which the left handed chiral fields are exchanged with right handed chiral fields and vice versa. Left(right) handed means direction of spin is opposite(same) to (as) the direction of momentum. This discrete symmetry arises in one very promising extension of standard model of particle physics where tiny neutrino masses naturally arise by seesaw mechanism. These domain walls are extended objects and hence will start dominating the Universe after the matter and radiation energy density decreases below a certain limit. However this is against observation, as we know our Universe is mostly matter dominated (+ a cosmological constant) from WMAP and other related experiments. Thus there needs to be some mechanism to make these walls disappear. One possible idea is to create a small pressure difference between two sides of the wall so that the true vacuum expands to occupy the entire causal Universe. We have talked about gravity induced higher dimensional terms (> dimension 4) which break the discrete symmetry explicitly creating the required pressure difference. How these higher dimensional terms break parity is a part of some higher theory (may be hidden sector supersymmetry breaking models, or some quantum gravity models) and we do not discuss that further in our paper. The domain wall disappearance through this mechanism however puts strict constraints on the discrete symmetry breaking scale. In one class of models (having Higgs triplets and hence type II seesaw), this symmetry breaking scale has to be pretty low (< 10^5 - 10^7 GeV) . But if this theory is a part of some higher theory such as SO(10) grand unified theory, then this left-right symmetry breaking scale has to be pretty high and hence is in disagreement with the constraints coming from domain wall removal. We also discuss another class of models (with Higgs doublets and hence type III or inverse seesaw) where both these constraints can be satisfied simultaneously. The good thing about models with Higgs doublets is that domain wall removal does not put very strict constraints on the symmetry breaking scales and hence do not give rise to conflict with grand unification which usually forces the symmetry breaking scale to be very high. Comments and criticism are welcome :)

Adios Shane Warne..we will miss you!

2011-05-21T22:59:00.002+05:30

Yesterday the iconic leg spinner Shane Warne had his last match of his life and I was quite fortunate to watch it live at Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai. It was an Indian Premiere League (IPL) match between Rajasthan Royals and Mumbai Indians. It was the first time for me to watch a match live in a stadium. And it was a damn good experience. Wankhede is a beautiful stadium specially under floodlights. The cool breeze from the Arabian sea keep passing through the stadium all the time. And it also changed my earlier perception that people hardly can recognize any player on the ground, I could actually locate each and every player on the ground and it was really fantastic. Regarding cricket, the match was totally one-sided with Rajasthan Royals winning by 10 wicket giving their captain Warne a perfect farewell. The crowd was pretty cool as well. Although Mumbai Indians were losing the match in front of their home supporters, yet the crowd was not taking any side much. They were cheering for Rajasthan Royals players like Watson, Dravid as well. An awesome stadium, a superb crowd and a couple of perfect cricketers in the match will make my first ever experience in a stadium memorable forever :)

A new course, a new institute: No big deal?

2011-05-18T21:56:00.002+05:30

New institutes, new Universities are coming up in many places across India. Although the need of such new institutes in a country with second largest population in the world can not be ruled out, the question often asked is whether the new institutions are living up to the expectations of the students, their parents or other fellow countrymen. Of course the academic reputation of an institute can not be purchased or built instantaneously and it takes some time, the government should at least make sure some of the minimum requirements before opening new institutes or universities. The same is true when an institute introduces a new course. The government often hurries a lot in the process it seems, may be because of the coming elections or some other sacred reasons which I can't think of. Couple of new IIT's were introduced four years back, and most of them without proper infra-structure. Most of them did not even have their own campus, the respective state governments were yet to allot land for the campus. So the new IIT's were either operating from some state government engineering college campus (like refugees) or in extreme cases operating from a different state within the campus of its mentor IIT. The students who might have got a place in a good NIT with good infra-structure and reputation opted for several such new IIT's thinking that the brand name will work. Is that enough? People don't come to IIT just for the tag. The life in IIT has more than just a tag. After spending five years in a premier institute like IIT Bombay, I know how much valuable the life here is, and at the same time I feel sad to see the new IIT's not yet having their own campus. The first 3-4 batches of these IIT's won't even see their own campus. Apart from that, the government also increased the intake of students in the IIT's introducing reservations. Even the older IIT's have become too much populated now, with many hostels are being under construction, reducing the green coverage as well. I can imagine how crowded the new IIT's will be which are operating from other colleges by occupying a small portion of the campus. It would have been much better if these IIT's were started at least after the land for the campus were allotted and are in a position to operate from their own campus.

Similar is true when an institute introduces a new course. They often overlook the fact that the infrastructure in the institute might not support that new course as well as the new students who will opt for the course. For example, the MSc-PhD dual degree course introduced in IITB in 2005 still sounds like alien to many of the academic office people. They have not yet mentioned this course in various certificates and we need to write our course name by hand there. They do not even know that after finishing MSc coursework we should get as much fellowship as other regular PhD students get. They are also confused whether they should give PhD, MSc or both the degrees after we complete the course. In short they are yet to introduce a proper booklet mentioning the rules and regulations about this new course. They just introduced the course six years back without giving much thought about it. One more problem this course facing is the availability of PhD supervisors. The institute takes regular PhD students twice a year, and every year one batch of Dual Degree with seven students are getting added to the list. So around 15-20 people are getting admitted to a course in the department which will ultimately lead to PhD degree. But do the department has as much infrastructure or faculty for that? Nobody seems to have an answer. Earlier the students had lots of freedom in choosing their topic as well as guide, but that no longer seems to be there since many faculty members have stopped offering projects due to overload. The institute should think about all these issues before taking new students every year. Hope to see some changes soon!