Amol Dighe

A brief introduction to Amol Dighe

Dr. Amol Dighe is a Professor of Physics in Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, in the Department of Theoretical Physics. He works in the area of High Energy Physics, which aims to understand the nature of fundamental interactions by studying properties of elementary particles. His recent research has focused on the particles known as neutrinos: their nature and the role they play in astrophysics and cosmology. He looks for signals of new physics at experiments like the Large Hadron Collider, and in the particles that come from the sky.

He completed his B.Tech. in Engineering Physics (1992) from the Indian Institute of Technnology, Bombay. His M.S. and Ph.D. (1997) were from the University of Chicago, where he explored signals of charge-parity violation in particle physics interactions. Later he was a postdoctoral researcher in ICTP (Trieste, Italy), CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) and Max Planck Institute for Physics (Munich, Germany), before joining TIFR as a faculty member in 2003.

He was one of the first Indian Bronze Medalists in the International Mathematics Olympiad, held in Germany in 1989. He has received the Institute Silver Medal from IIT Bombay, and the Worldlab-CERN John Bell Scholarship. He was the Leader of the Max Planck -- India Partner Group in Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics for five years. He has been elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy. He has won the Swarnajayanti Fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology, and is the recepient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award.

A brief introduction to neutrinos

Neutrinos are some of the most elusive particles in the universe. They are the second most abundant particles in the universe, and trillions of them pass through us every second without us even realizing it. At the same time, they help the sun shine, make stars explode, and allow us to see places from where light cannot reach us.

A brief introduction to B mesons

Mesons are particles that consists of a quark and an antiquark. B mesons are those that contain either a bottom quark or a bottom antiquark. These mesons typically weigh about 5 times the proton, and are highly unstable, the lifetime being of the order of picoseconds. The observation of their decays tells us about the fundamental interactions of matter. Indeed, these observations were instrumental in the confirmation of the currently accepted CKM mechanism for charge-parity (CP) violation.