Student-Talks at the Department of Theoretical Physics (DTP) at TIFR
The idea is to have 2 students from TIFR give 2 talks every week. One on Monday and one on Friday and if either requires an extra slot then it can be aranged somewhere in the middle of the week like Wednesday. The default venue is Theory Seminar Room A304 at 6Pm on the above mentioned days of the week.
Currently the talks are being scheduled as per alphabetical order of the email ids of the students of DTP. If other people want to be included in the list either for giving the talks or for receiving notifications then kindly inform me. Notifcations for the talks will be put-up here on this website and the speakers will be reminded of their slots one week in advance through private emails and will be requested to send me an abstract to be used in the public notice. The announcemnet of the talk on the day will be sent by public email to all students of DTP and to others who want to included in the list.
An incomplete tentative schedule with the talk titles is on the firstsheet of this file. The second sheet of the same file contains the list of names of speakers in alphabetical order.
I was offerring a token Rs.25 from my TIFR stipend to the speaker for his/her efforts to give the talk.
From 1st Februray 2010 onwards I increased the remuneration to Rs.35 for various technical reasons.
No tea or snacks will be arranged.
The 5 talks till now,
Date: 19th February 2010
Title: Deconfined Criticality
Speaker: Argya
Venue: A304
Time: 6:30Pm
Duration: 2Hours
Abstract:
From Landau theory, transitions from an 'Antiferromagnetic' phase to a
'valence bond solid' phase is expected to be first order in nature.
The theory of 'deconfined criticality' proposes continuous
transition between the two phases. If realised in nature, these are
possible exmaples of phase transitions where Landau theory does not work.
Attended by: Kusum,Prithwi,Tridib,Jyotirmoy,Shawnmoy,Sambuddha,Anirbit.
Date: 8th February 2010
Title: Cosmological Perturbations
Speaker: Rahul
Venue: A304
Time: 6Pm
Duration: 2Hours
Abstract:
I will try to give an overview of cosmological perturbation theory, which is
to say how you handle the situation which arise when the universe isn't a pure
FRW homogenous-isotropic one. I plan that it'll be a heuristic development, so
more of a how-i-understand-how-this-comes-about thing rather than
here-it-is-and-now-lets-see-various-solutions-oh-here-is-the-radiation-dominated-one
thing. As for what this cosmological perturbation theory actually is, the
shortest paper on the subject I could find is astro-ph/0101009. I assume a
knowledge of GR. Can't say 'basic', because I don't know what exactly basic
is. But uncomplicated.
Attended by: Shawnmoy,Nikhil,Mononeeta,Sambuddha,Preeti,Anirbit and Amaresh (attended for sometime).
Date: 1st February 2010
Title: Xtreme QCD
Speaker: Debashish
Venue: A304
Time: 6Pm
Duration: 1Hour
Abstract:
The aim is to try to discuss the phase diagram of QCD and QCD-like theories
under extreme conditions of temperature and density. To appreciate what goes
on at such extreme conditions, we need to examine the salient features of
these theories such as confinement and chiral symmetry breaking and
connections between them.
Attended by: Sambuddha, Sanmay, Jyotirmoy, Anirbit, Kabir and Kusum.
Loganayagam came in at the very end.
Date: 29th January 2010
Title: A review of the article "What is Gauge?' by Terence Tao (Part 2)
Speaker: Anirbit
Venue: A304
Time: 6Pm
Duration: 1Hour
Abstract:
We continue reviewing the mentioned article by Terence.
Today I hope to clean up a bit more of Terence's idea of taking quotient of
the space of line segments by congruences.
Then we will go through Terence's way of motivating the idea of "connections"
and hopefully give examples of local structure groups.
May be we will digress a bit at the end to see how the idea of structure group
also makes sense for combinatorial objects like a directed graph.
Attended by: Kabir,Sambuddha and Imon
Date: 25th January 2010
Title: A review of the article "What is Gauge?' by Terence Tao (Part 1)
Speaker: Anirbit
Venue: A304
Time: 5:30Pm
Duration: 1Hour
Abstract:
I have been recently reading the above linked article on Gauge Theory and I found the exposition by Terence Tao very masterful (like any of his other writings!). You are encouraged to find out more about the author Terence Tao if you have never heard of him so that you can be fully convinced as to why it is worth trying to understand his analysis about anything! I was finding it more insightful than others I have come across. I haven't yet read the full article but I hope to read along while I explain whatever I have covered. I believe that trying to explain what I am reading helps the process of reading especially when the content is so very complicated like this one is!
Attended by: Rupal,Sanmay,Nilay,Sambuddha,Imon,and another person!
Loganayagam came in towards the middle.