The Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER), Pune conducted an event in the field of Physics, called PHYSICS @ IISER on 27th October, 2009. The idea behind this was to get together the physicists from different topics, working at IISER Pune and have them tell the others here about their work. The event spanned two days and comprised talks by the physicists on their current topics of active research. The audience consisted of undergraduate as well as PhD students and the faculty of IISER Pune.
The first talk on day one was delivered by Dr. G. Ambika on Synchronizing Chaos.
She spoke about chaos in various dynamical systems and mathematical
formalism used to represent it. The next talk was by Dr. Sudarshan
Ananth, on Relating the Forces of Nature. He started with the
four fundamental forces in nature and talked about the fuzzy nature of
Quantum Mechanics, as well as the disagreement between the former and
Gravity, when united.
He was followed by Dr. Ramana Athreya, who spoke on Probing the Universe at Low Frequencies. He described the various exciting and challenging aspects of Astronomy in general, and Radio Astronomy in particular. How radio astronomy helps to build high resolution images of distant celestial objects, is his interest.
Then Dr. Arijit Bhattacharya talked on the Phase Slip Centers (PSCs) of Superconductors. He explained how a simplified model helps us explore the function space for PSCs and other localized solutions. This is his field of research. He was followed by Dr. Apratim Chatterjee and Dr. Harsh Chaturvedi, who spoke on Living Polymers, Charged, Colloidal & Polymer-polymer Transition, and Light-induced Molecular Assembly, respectively.
Then Dr. Prasad Subramanian spoke on From TeV flares in Blazars to Coronal Mass Ejection from our Sun - Some Issues in Plasma Astrophysics, which is his current research topic. Next came, Dr. Sulabha Kulkarni, who presented on the exciting topic of Harnessing Nanomaterials. Dr. T.S. Mahesh followed her, with his research topic on Spins as Quantum Bits, a hot topic on Quantum Computation.
Then we had a few talks subscribing to the regime of Quantum Mechanics such as Nanomechanics using Atomic Force Microscopy, by Dr. Shivaprasad Patil, and Control & Measurement of Quantum Systems, by Dr. Umakant Rappol in the afternoon. Dr. Santhanam then delivered a talk on Quantum chaos, 1/f Noise and Spectral Statistics. The last spokesperson of this event was Dr. Shouvik Datta, whose topic was Thermodynamics of Electronic Transitions in Nano-photovoltaic Devices.
The event led to the presentation and discussion on various interesting topics of Physics. The audience played their part effectively by posing questions. It was an interactive out-of-the-classroom activity that has surely been a boost to physics at IISER Pune. We await such events in the future. |  |