Monday, November 30, 2009

HRI Summer School on Gravitation & Cosmology (May 10-22, 2010)

A school on Gravitation and Cosmology will be held at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute (HRI) during the period May 10-22, 2010. The school is open to final year Bachelor's and Master's students, and the aim of the school will be to introduce students to the field of Cosmology.

Information about the school is available at the HRI web-site at the following URL:

  http://www.hri.res.in/~ssgc/

L. Sriramkumar and T. Roy Choudhury
(on behalf of the organising committee)



Thursday, November 19, 2009

The International School On Strings And Fundamental Physics

The Munich string theory group is organizing the International School On Strings And Fundamental Physics. The two-week school is aimed at students and postdocs working in the area of string theory. The school will be held in Munich/Garching, July 25 – August 6, 2010.

More details are available at the school website. One of the points made in the site is the following:

The aim is to give excellent people who cannot get funding from their home institute the possibility to participate in an international event, and to encourage worldwide contacts and collaborations within the scientific community.


Students and Post-docs from India are encouraged to apply to the school.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The new Lucasian professor of mathematics

String theorist, Michael Green has been appointed as the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. He will be succeeding Stephen Hawking. In the past the chair has been occupied by Dirac and Newton. Here is the report from the Guardian.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prizes 2009

Rajesh Gopakumar of the HRI, Allahabad has been awarded India's top scientific award in Physical Sciences (along with Abhishek Dhar of RRI, Bangalore). Rajesh is the sixth scientist working in the area of string theory to get the award -- the others are Ashoke Sen, Sumit Das, Sunil Mukhi, Sandip Trivedi and Atish Dabholkar.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

National Strings Meeting 2010 (NSM10)

The next edition of the National Strings Meeting (NSM10) will be hosted by IIT Bombay and locally organized by Dr. P. Ramadevi.

Dates: 10-15 February 2010 (starts after lunch on 10th and ends with lunch on 15th).

As usual, the meeting will be sponsored by contributions from various Institutions around the country. More details will be posted as and when available.

Update(Nov. 25, 2009): The NSM10 homepage is ready.

Monday, September 28, 2009

RIP: Alok Kumar

Here is the email from IOP Bhubaneswar on the passing away of Alok Kumar

On September 26, Alok passed away at 10:45 in the morning due to a cardiac arrest. He was 48. He left behind his spouse Archana and their only kid Harshul (fondly known to us as Siddhu).

We offer our heartfelt condolences to his family. For us, in Institute of Physics, it is an irreparable loss at every front.

Friends
Institute of Physics
Bhubaneswar
India

Update
: Sudipta Mukherji has created a webpage in Alok's memory.



Tuesday, September 15, 2009

The XXV SERC Main School on THEP

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the XXV SERC Main School on Theoretical High Energy Physics to be held during 2-22 April 2010 at the Department of Physics, Panjab University. This is the 25th in the series of such schools sponsored by the SERC division of DST, Govt. of India, and conducted every year nationally since 1985. The aim is to provide an overview on different topics in high energy physics to the Ph.D. students in their early years of research. Each school has pedagogical lectures on selected topics supported by rigorous tutorial sessions.

This school will have the following courses:

Course I Perturbative QCD
Lecturer:
Prof. Rahul Basu (IMSc, Chennai)
Guest Faculty: TBA

Course II GUTs: Flavour Physics & Leptogenesis
Lecturer: Prof. Goran Senjanovic (ICTP, Trieste) .
Guest Faculty: Prof. Borut Bajc (Institut Josep Stefan, Ljubljana)

Course III SM Higgs and Top Physics at the LHC
Lecturer: Prof. Saurabh Rindani (PRL, Ahmedabad)
Guest Faculty: TBA

Course IV AdS/CFT and Hydrodynamics
Lecturer: Prof. Shiraz Minwalla (TIFR, Mumbai)
Guest Faculty: R. Loganayagam (TIFR, Mumbai).

Applications are invited from graduate students working for their Ph.D degree in Theoretical High Energy Physics. Fresh postdoctoral fellows working in the field and highly motivated final year M.Sc.(Physics) students are also welcome. Preference will be given to those who have already attended a SERC Preliminary School. Students are expected to participate for the full duration of the school.

Selected participants will be paid round trip travel expenses by train (3AC). Organisers will also take care of the local hospitality of the participants.

Please visit: http://physics.puchd.ac.in/sercxxv for more details. For general information on SERC Schools on THEP, please visit http://www.mri.ernet.in/~sercthep/index.html

The last date for receiving completed applications is 10 November 2009. Please fill out the application form and send it by post or a scanned copy by e-mail to :

Prof. Charanjit S. Aulakh
Director
XXV SERC THEP Main School,
Department of Physics,
Panjab Univ., Chandigarh 160014

E-mail: sercxxv@pu.ac.in ; sercxxv@gmail.com
Phone: +91-172-2534449(1300-1900 Hrs) ,
Fax: +91-172-2783336

Saturday, July 25, 2009

XXV Preparatory SERC School in Theoretical High Energy Physics

The next Preparatory SERC school in Theoretical High Energy Physics is to be held from October 4-30, 2009 at the Department of Physics, IIT Madras. The Director of the school is Dr. Prasanta K. Tripathy of IIT Madras.

Courses (Lecturers):

  • Quantum Field Theory (S. Govindarajan, IITM);
  • Group Theory (H.S. Sharatchandra, IMSc);
  • Particle Physics and the Standard Model (S. Umasankar, IITB Sourov Roy, IACS );
  • General Relativity and Cosmology (G. Date, IMSc) and
  • Statistical Methods in Physics (D. Indumathi, IMSc)
Prerequisites: Special Theory of Relativity, Relativistic Kinematics, Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, Electromagnetism in 4-vector notation

Further details are available at the homepage of the school. Interested graduate students may visit the site for further details.


Thursday, July 23, 2009

RIP Jaydeep Majumder (1972-2009)

Jaydeep Majumder passed away at 6:00am on July 22, 2009 in Bhubaneswar. He was admitted to the hospital the previous evening at 10:30pm. Hospital scans revealed that he had a tumor in his brain and that may have been the cause of his untimely and unexpected passing away at a very young age. He had recently joined NISER, Bhubaneswar as a faculty member and was excited about having to teach quantum mechanics during the coming semester. He is survived by his wife. Our sincere and heartfelt condolences are to his immediate family. He will also be missed by all his friends like me.

A bit about Jaydeep: Jaydeep did his B.Sc. (1994) and M.Sc. (1996) in Physics from Calcutta university and then joined the Ph.D. programme at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute (HRI) after spending a semester at Tata Institute (TIFR) in Mumbai. He completed his Ph.D. in 2001/2 under the supervision of Prof. Ashoke Sen. Subsequently, he did post-docs at Rutgers and the Helsinki Institute of Physics. He then joined MNNIT, Allahabad as an Assistant Professor in 2008 before moving to NISER, Bhubaneswar in June 2009. His research in the recent past has been in the area of cosmology. His publications are listed in the SPIRES database.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

4th Asian Winter School on Strings, Particles and Cosmology


The 4th Asian Winter School on Strings, Particles and Cosmology is to be held in Mahabaleswar, Maharashtra, during January 11-20, 2010.

This School is being organized as a program of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of TIFR. It forms part of an ongoing series of Asian Winter schools organized by China, India, Japan and Korea. The previous Schools were held in

Korea <http://www.apctp.org/topical/stringws2007/>,

Japan <http://www-conf.kek.jp/nasulec/2007/> and

China<http://www.itp.ac.cn/conference.php?cID=string08>.


The current school also combines with the series of Asian Schools
<http://www-conf.kek.jp/nasulec/> on Particles, Strings and Cosmology held annually in Japan.

The School will cover various areas in String Theory, High Energy Physics and Cosmology. The intended audience consists of senior graduate students as well as practicing researchers. The lectures will cover a selection of basic areas as well as advanced topics at the forefront of current research. The list of speakers includes:

Ignatios Antoniadis (Ecole Polytechnique, France)
John Ellis* (CERN, Switzerland)
Sean Hartnoll (Harvard University, USA)
Kenneth Intrilligator (Univ. of California, San Diego, USA)
Liam McAllister (Cornell University, USA)
Shiraz Minwalla (TIFR, India)
Andrew Strominger (Harvard University, USA)
Herman Verlinde (Princeton University, USA)
Laurance Yaffe (University of Washington, Seattle, USA)

* To be confirmed

Further details and updates can be found in the School web page:
http://www.icts.res.in/program/asian4


Organizing Committee:

Amol Dighe (TIFR, India)
Rajesh Gopakumar (HRI, India)
Hyung Do Kim (Seoul National University, Korea)
Nakwoo Kim (Kyung Hee University, Korea)
Hideo Kodama (Kyoto University, Japan)
Yasuhiro Okada (Okada, Japan)
Sreerup Raychaudhuri (TIFR, India)
Tarun Souradeep (IUCAA, India)
Tadashi Takayanagi (IPMU, Japan)
Gautam Mandal (TIFR, India) Scientific Director of the School

Spenta R. Wadia, (Director, ICTS of TIFR) Overall Director of the School

Monday, June 8, 2009

NISER, Bhubaneswar

Jaydeep Majumder has moved from MNNIT, Allahabad to NISER, Bhubaneswar from June 1, 2009. He belongs to the first round of faculty members hired this year.