I am a theoretical physicist and a member of the Department of Theoretical Physics in the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. My current interests are reflected in my talks and courses I give, and in my page of links.

General Area of Interest: Hot and Dense Matter

Relativistic matter at high temperature interests me. The primary example is the universe soon after its birth. I'm more directly interested in experimental tests of the theories that may apply to such systems. Such experiments are now being done in Brookhaven Lab near New York and will soon start at CERN in Geneva.

I have a prediction for the location of the critical point of QCD. The green dots show two estimates of the critical point made by Gavai and me, each with its own systematic uncertainty. The blue band is an estimate of the true position of the end point. The downward going curve is the freezeout condition of a fireball created in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC. It is traced out by changing the energy of the collisions. This is currently under test in a 30 week long run of the collider at Brookhaven called the RHIC energy scan.

Lattice QCD and Thermal field theory

Actively doing lattice gauge theory; using supercomputers to probe aspects of the physics of Quantum Chromodynamics (see the 2004 Nobel prize) at high temperature and large density. Interested in effective field theory formulations of the long distance physics under such conditions. As a consequence of the lattice work, very actively interested in high performance and parallel computation.

Non-equilibrium systems

I'm interested in hydrodynamics and transport in relativistic fluids. My collaborator in this enterprise, Rajeev Bhalerao, and I discovered that diffusion and viscosity produce phenomena which are quite different from what happens in familiar non-relativisitic fluids. Some of these predictions are being checked in experiments in Brookhaven. Ecosystems which perform computations (read about the most famous example) are among my research interests. I'm also interested in analogues of phase ordering kinetics in relativistic classical field theories (Some pictures).

Other interests

Strongly interacting field theories and various computational techniques for them; effective long-distance theories, hadronic phenomenology. Among my long term academic interests are turbulence, quantum computation, cryptography, biological evolution, protein folding, science education, electronic collaboration techniques, moths, butterflies, avifauna, Su Doku and Kakuro. For fun, see my page of photos.