Search Collections

DARK MATTER AND THE SEARCH FOR PHYSICS BEYOND THE STANDARD MODEL"Darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest."- Jalal-ud-din Rumi of Balkh (1207 - 1273)High energy Physics today has, in a sense, literally entered into a Dark Age. We know for about two decades that the Universe is mainly dark, with more than a quarter being Dark Matter, and roughly two-thirds being Dark Energy. It is only the remaining five percent or so of the Universe which we have been able to investigate thoroughly, and even here all that we have is a very successful  phenomenological model – which we proudly call the Standard Model – which itself has plenty of loopholes. At the moment, both on the theoretical and experimental front, therefore, high energy physicists are essentially groping in the dark for answers to these puzzles. This is a good moment, therefore, to introspect, and it is in this context that the thought-provoking words quoted above become especially relevant, for it is by probing the p...

DARK MATTER AND THE SEARCH FOR PHYSICS BEYOND THE STANDARD MODEL"Darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest."- Jalal-ud-din Rumi of Balkh (1207 - 1273)High energy Physics today has, in a sense, literally entered into a Dark Age. We know for about two decades that the Universe is mainly dark, with more than a quarter being Dark Matter, and roughly two-thirds being Dark Energy. It is only the remaining five percent or so of the Universe which we have been able to investigate thoroughly, and even here all that we have is a very successful  phenomenological model – which we proudly call the Standard Model – which itself has plenty of loopholes. At the moment, both on the theoretical and experimental front, therefore, high energy physicists are essentially groping in the dark for answers to these puzzles. This is a good moment, therefore, to introspect, and it is in this context that the thought-provoking words quoted above become especially relevant, for it is by probing the p...

This program aims to bring together people working on classical and quantum systems with disorder and interactions. The extensive exploration, through experiments, simulations and model calculations, of growing correlation lengths associated with the rapid increases of viscosity and relaxation times in classical systems is a major recent development in the study of the glass transition. At the same time, there have also been significant advances, recently, in the effort to combine density functional theory with dynamical mean-field theory (DFT+DMFT) to understand the properties of quantum many-body systems. These involve treating interactions using quantum impurity models, thereby connecting directly to the physics of disordered systems. Another interesting recent direction of investigation is understanding how the interplay of interactions and disorder in quantum many-body systems can lead to ergodic and non-ergodic phases and transitions between them. The common themes of disorder an...

This program aims to bring together people working on classical and quantum systems with disorder and interactions. The extensive exploration, through experiments, simulations and model calculations, of growing correlation lengths associated with the rapid increases of viscosity and relaxation times in classical systems is a major recent development in the study of the glass transition. At the same time, there have also been significant advances, recently, in the effort to combine density functional theory with dynamical mean-field theory (DFT+DMFT) to understand the properties of quantum many-body systems. These involve treating interactions using quantum impurity models, thereby connecting directly to the physics of disordered systems. Another interesting recent direction of investigation is understanding how the interplay of interactions and disorder in quantum many-body systems can lead to ergodic and non-ergodic phases and transitions between them. The common themes of disorder an...

This Summer Program on Dynamics of Complex Systems is second in the series. The theme for the program this year is Mathematical Biology. Over the past decades, the focus of many of those working in nonlinear science, in India as well as internationally, has increasingly shifted towards problems in biology. The emergence of network science, of systems biology, of computational neuroscience, and of physical biology as vibrant areas of research have greatly contributed to this. The purpose of this summer program is to nucleate collaborative interdisciplinary activities, and to bring together researchers located in diverse institutions, especially in India, to a common forum, to discuss problems of interest and to address contemporary issues in computational systems biology and modeling.The program has two major parts: a two-week long Summer School on mathematical biology from 10 to 25 May, 2017 and a two-week long Workshop on Physical and Systems Biology (WPSB) from 12 to 25 June, 2017. T...

This Summer Program on Dynamics of Complex Systems is second in the series. The theme for the program this year is Mathematical Biology. Over the past decades, the focus of many of those working in nonlinear science, in India as well as internationally, has increasingly shifted towards problems in biology. The emergence of network science, of systems biology, of computational neuroscience, and of physical biology as vibrant areas of research have greatly contributed to this. The purpose of this summer program is to nucleate collaborative interdisciplinary activities, and to bring together researchers located in diverse institutions, especially in India, to a common forum, to discuss problems of interest and to address contemporary issues in computational systems biology and modeling.The program has two major parts: a two-week long Summer School on mathematical biology from 10 to 25 May, 2017 and a two-week long Workshop on Physical and Systems Biology (WPSB) from 12 to 25 June, 2017. T...

This joint program is co-sponsored by ICTS and SAMSI (as part of the SAMSI yearlong program on Astronomy; ASTRO). The primary goal of this program is to further enrich the international collaboration in the area of synoptic time domain surveys and time series analysis of gravitational wave data. The participants will focus on advancing the current understanding of these research topics by incorporating expertise of researchers from India and US who are working on identifying electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources. In essence, this program would enable US researchers to learn from the expertise of Indian researchers and also enable US researchers to exchange and share the methodologies developed by two of the five working groups of the SAMSI ASTRO program.The program will begin with a few overview lectures designed to familiarize attendees with current trends in time domain astronomy and modern methodologies in statistics and applied mathematics. The subsequent part ...

Complex analytic geometry is a very broad area of mathematics straddling differential geometry, algebraic geometry and analysis. Much of the interactions between mathematics and theoretical physics, especially string theory, channels through complex analytic geometry. Some of the high points of research in this topic are: Yau’s proof of Calabi’s conjecture, Donaldson-Uhlenbeck-Yau’s theorem that poly stable vector bundles are precisely the solutions of the Hermitian-Einstein equation, Demailly’s work of Kobayashi hyperbolicity.

This joint program is co-sponsored by ICTS and SAMSI (as part of the SAMSI yearlong program on Astronomy; ASTRO). The primary goal of this program is to further enrich the international collaboration in the area of synoptic time domain surveys and time series analysis of gravitational wave data. The participants will focus on advancing the current understanding of these research topics by incorporating expertise of researchers from India and US who are working on identifying electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources. In essence, this program would enable US researchers to learn from the expertise of Indian researchers and also enable US researchers to exchange and share the methodologies developed by two of the five working groups of the SAMSI ASTRO program.The program will begin with a few overview lectures designed to familiarize attendees with current trends in time domain astronomy and modern methodologies in statistics and applied mathematics. The subsequent part ...

Complex analytic geometry is a very broad area of mathematics straddling differential geometry, algebraic geometry and analysis. Much of the interactions between mathematics and theoretical physics, especially string theory, channels through complex analytic geometry. Some of the high points of research in this topic are: Yau’s proof of Calabi’s conjecture, Donaldson-Uhlenbeck-Yau’s theorem that poly stable vector bundles are precisely the solutions of the Hermitian-Einstein equation, Demailly’s work of Kobayashi hyperbolicity.

Particle accelerators have been instrumental in unraveling some of the deep questions related to matter at the fundamental level, the latest being discovery of the Higgs Boson. The conventional accelerators, however, have reached their limit in terms of size and energy, as acceleration gradients in the state of art accelerators have reached the material breakdown limit (~ MV/cm). A new principle of particle acceleration is desirable at this juncture. A strong candidate for this is the plasma wake field based acceleration (driven by lasers and/or particle beams). This scheme provides a promise of about thousand fold increase in the acceleration gradient (~ GV/cm). Furthermore, plasma being already a broken down medium, does not get adversely effected by such huge electric fields. This paves a way for building table top compact accelerators for electron as well as ion beams which can make crucial contributions to our fundamental understanding of matter and would have applications in many...

Particle accelerators have been instrumental in unraveling some of the deep questions related to matter at the fundamental level, the latest being discovery of the Higgs Boson. The conventional accelerators, however, have reached their limit in terms of size and energy, as acceleration gradients in the state of art accelerators have reached the material breakdown limit (~ MV/cm). A new principle of particle acceleration is desirable at this juncture. A strong candidate for this is the plasma wake field based acceleration (driven by lasers and/or particle beams). This scheme provides a promise of about thousand fold increase in the acceleration gradient (~ GV/cm). Furthermore, plasma being already a broken down medium, does not get adversely effected by such huge electric fields. This paves a way for building table top compact accelerators for electron as well as ion beams which can make crucial contributions to our fundamental understanding of matter and would have applications in many...