Home Page of V Suneeta

Suneeta

 

        Suneeta Vardarajan

          Associate Professor,

          Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Pune,
           Dr. Homi Bhabha (Pashan NCL) Road,
          Pune 411008, Maharashtra, INDIA.
            E-mail: suneeta_AT_iiserpune.ac.in

 
 

 
 

 
 

 


If one proves the equality of two numbers a and b by showing first that "a is less than or equal to b" and then "a is greater than or equal to b", it is unfair, one should instead show that they are really equal by disclosing the inner ground for their equality.
Emmy Noether




Education:

       


Past Positions:

       

For more detailed information, and a full list of my publications, see my CV (updated May 2016). I am a member of the Mathematics and Physics groups at IISER Pune.



Research :

        
I am a theoretical physicist and work in two inter-connected fields: gravitation and mathematical physics. In gravitation, I am mainly interested in black hole physics, and work on problems ranging from classical perturbation theory (which is important for providing astrophysical signatures of black holes) to quantum features of black holes. In my group (which includes Ph.D students Amruta Sadhu and Dhanya Menon), we also study the nonlinear effects in gravitation. We are particularly interested in nonlinear instabilities in matter propagation in spacetimes - in an analytical understanding of when they can occur, and the outcome of such an instability.
In mathematical physics, I am mainly interested in Ricci flow, a flow of geometries which was used to prove the Poincare conjecture in mathematics. New geometric techniques were introduced in the proof. This flow equation appears naturally in physics as a renormalization group (RG) flow for a class of quantum field theories. My work in the last few years in this area has been to exploit this connection, and the geometric techniques from Ricci flow, to yield insights both in two dimensional quantum field theories and mathematics.
M.S students who were part of our group at IISER Pune and who have now graduated: Pranav Kumar, Bhavesh Khamesra, Ashutosh Agnihotri.
Note for students:
Summer project positions are only through IISER's official summer student program.
Reference requests: Some general guidelines for IISER students who need reference letters from me - I would prefer to give letters to students who have had an academic interaction with me outside class hours, or have been my project students. Requests should be sent by email first, along with the registration number or a copy of the grade sheet/transcript and about 3 - 4 weeks before the deadline.



Professional activities (partial list) :

    



Teaching :


Links to course pages for courses I am teaching currently can be found below. A brief list of courses I have taught in the past can be found here .