The award ceremony for the Rahul Basu Memorial Award for the best thesis in High Energy Physics in the years 2016-2018 took place on 13th December 2018 during the DAE symposium held at IIT Madras. As in other years, two nominees Dr. Apratim Kaviraj and Dr Ipsita Saha win selected for the award, and two nominees, Dr Taushif Ahmed and Dr Rusa Mandal received honourable mention for their contributions. All four awardees presented their work at the award ceremony, Dr Kaviraj and Dr Mandal in person, and Dr Saha and Dr Ahmed via Skype.
Dr. Kaviraj gave a very clear and comprehensive talk on the bootstrap method, and how it could be applied to the AdS/CFT correspondence. This area is notorious for the incomprehensibility of its papers,and to hear it explained so clearly was a rare experience. Dr Kaviraj's own thesis contained a significant new step in incorporating Witten diagrams and the use of the Mellin space, which simplifies the computations significantly, to a point where the computation can be automated. New results which demonstrated the power of the new technique were also obtained. This was truly a thesis which was worthy of the award.
Dr Ipsita Saha gave a talk on Skype on her thesis on her study of the physics beyond the SM at the LHC in the light of dark matter searches. She summarised both the successes and the shortcomings of the Standard Model, and the current efforts to go beyond the standard model. Her work focussed on the efforts togo beyond the standard model by incorporating additional features to the theory. She discussed the implications of the addition of a scalar doublet for the vacuum stability problem, the addition of complex scalar triplet for the neutrino mass problem, and that of the addition of a complex scalar triplet plus real singlet for dark matter. The experimental signatures of the theoretical calculations were also touched upon.
Dr. Taushif Ahmed also gave his talk on Skype. His talk was on QCD radiative corrections to Higgs physics. He explained clearly why it was necessary to go beyond the leading order corrections to make quantitatively correct corrections for the Higgs Boson cross sections, as well as rapidity distributions and form factors for Drell Yan processes. Factorisation methods were incorporated to obtain very accurate and reliable results.
Dr Rusa Mandal was present to give her talk in person. She spoke on rare B decays and new physics. She analysed decays of the B meson to K plus leptons type via parametric forms of the Standard Model amplitude eliminated hadronic contributions, and obtained results independent of nonfactorisable contributions with minimal dependence on form factors. This is a new technique which could be generalised to other cases.
The awards were presented by Prof. G. Rajasekaran, one of India's most senior high enegy physicists, and a former colleague of Prof. Rahul Basu's at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. He concluded with a short remembrance of Rahul, and how his contribution in all spheres was missed by his colleagues, several of whom were present at the ceremony.
The award committee consisted of Bedangadas Mohanty (Chair), Sunanda Bannerjee, Debayoti Chowdhuri, Debashis Ghoshal, Rohini Godbole, Sourendu Gupta, Neelima Gupte, and Sunil Mukhi.
The award committee worked very hard to carry out the herculean task of going through all the nominations and coming to a unanimous conclusion. They also consulted a number of experts outside the committee. Heartfelt thanks are due to all, and most especially to Prof. Bedangadas Mohanty, the committee chair, and his meticulous organisation of the entire process. Due to their continuing effort, and also due to unstinted support from the Indian Physics Association, the award has now got established in the high energy physics community. Students in the area now vie for the award and are inspired by the talks and the professional level of the awardees.
We hope this award will contribute further to increasing the activity and contributions of the high energy physics community of India.
This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.
Photos: First photo : Dr. Apratim Kaviraj and Prof. G. Rajasekaran.
Second photo: Dr. Rusa Mandal and Prof. G. Rajasekaran
Dr. Ipsita Saha and Dr. Taushif Ahmed can be seen on the
screen in both photos.
Tailpiece:
L-R: Drs. G.D. Date, M.V.N. Murthy, Rahul Basu and Matthias Brack in the IMSc GH porch, sometime in the early 90-s. (Photo credit: Matthias Brack).
Dr. Kaviraj gave a very clear and comprehensive talk on the bootstrap method, and how it could be applied to the AdS/CFT correspondence. This area is notorious for the incomprehensibility of its papers,and to hear it explained so clearly was a rare experience. Dr Kaviraj's own thesis contained a significant new step in incorporating Witten diagrams and the use of the Mellin space, which simplifies the computations significantly, to a point where the computation can be automated. New results which demonstrated the power of the new technique were also obtained. This was truly a thesis which was worthy of the award.
Dr Ipsita Saha gave a talk on Skype on her thesis on her study of the physics beyond the SM at the LHC in the light of dark matter searches. She summarised both the successes and the shortcomings of the Standard Model, and the current efforts to go beyond the standard model. Her work focussed on the efforts togo beyond the standard model by incorporating additional features to the theory. She discussed the implications of the addition of a scalar doublet for the vacuum stability problem, the addition of complex scalar triplet for the neutrino mass problem, and that of the addition of a complex scalar triplet plus real singlet for dark matter. The experimental signatures of the theoretical calculations were also touched upon.
Dr. Taushif Ahmed also gave his talk on Skype. His talk was on QCD radiative corrections to Higgs physics. He explained clearly why it was necessary to go beyond the leading order corrections to make quantitatively correct corrections for the Higgs Boson cross sections, as well as rapidity distributions and form factors for Drell Yan processes. Factorisation methods were incorporated to obtain very accurate and reliable results.
Dr Rusa Mandal was present to give her talk in person. She spoke on rare B decays and new physics. She analysed decays of the B meson to K plus leptons type via parametric forms of the Standard Model amplitude eliminated hadronic contributions, and obtained results independent of nonfactorisable contributions with minimal dependence on form factors. This is a new technique which could be generalised to other cases.
The awards were presented by Prof. G. Rajasekaran, one of India's most senior high enegy physicists, and a former colleague of Prof. Rahul Basu's at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. He concluded with a short remembrance of Rahul, and how his contribution in all spheres was missed by his colleagues, several of whom were present at the ceremony.
The award committee consisted of Bedangadas Mohanty (Chair), Sunanda Bannerjee, Debayoti Chowdhuri, Debashis Ghoshal, Rohini Godbole, Sourendu Gupta, Neelima Gupte, and Sunil Mukhi.
The award committee worked very hard to carry out the herculean task of going through all the nominations and coming to a unanimous conclusion. They also consulted a number of experts outside the committee. Heartfelt thanks are due to all, and most especially to Prof. Bedangadas Mohanty, the committee chair, and his meticulous organisation of the entire process. Due to their continuing effort, and also due to unstinted support from the Indian Physics Association, the award has now got established in the high energy physics community. Students in the area now vie for the award and are inspired by the talks and the professional level of the awardees.
We hope this award will contribute further to increasing the activity and contributions of the high energy physics community of India.
This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.
Photos: First photo : Dr. Apratim Kaviraj and Prof. G. Rajasekaran.
Second photo: Dr. Rusa Mandal and Prof. G. Rajasekaran
Dr. Ipsita Saha and Dr. Taushif Ahmed can be seen on the
screen in both photos.
Tailpiece:
L-R: Drs. G.D. Date, M.V.N. Murthy, Rahul Basu and Matthias Brack in the IMSc GH porch, sometime in the early 90-s. (Photo credit: Matthias Brack).
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