So long, what's up?

Yeah, it's been quite sometime now. Well beyond the post-thesis period. And well-beyond the TIFR period now, as well.
That was quite a statement! Leaving a place where I have about a fourth of
my life is never easy; and I won't pretend it was. Somehow, I was in a dream buoyed by the fantasy world of Westeros by George R R Martin. This, at the very least, was a shock absorber. I was still in the middle of the second book when I boarded the train (after the customary see off by my friends; I wasn't sure if I should be happy or sad; and most definitely didn't behave in the way I had planned! Now, what did I plan? That's a secret!) And then back home, I got absorbed in the "family" way of doing things, which is, no matter how hard I try at poles apart from my life in TIFR.
So what is exactly the difference? Its not that I used to spend more time on my work in TIFR than here, though it seems like it is. There was a routine at TIFR: we used to go for lunch at 12:15 nearly always, and for tea always at 3:30; maybe where you'd go for dinner was something that could be changed at the last moment. And so there is a routine here: get out at 9:40 to reach workplace by 10:30, have lunch at 1:15 etc. The dinner option is not there (of course I can always my mother to prepare something interesting to surprise me!), and a considerable amount of time spent commuting, including some good amount of exercise in walking with a heavy laptop on the back! So at the very least, I don't have to worry about my exercise so long as I don't always behave like a glutton. It's just that these two routines are different, not in their nature but in their schedules. When I was very young, while thinking about  why I wanted to do research, I convinced myself that it was because I could do it whenever I wanted. You didn't have to do from 10AM-5PM like in regular office. Now I know better: doing this involves a serious thought process, and unless you force yourself to develop this habit even while you are commuting, you have to do it the regular way! Of course, you can always work after you come back from office; but if you have a family, its gonna get harder. Still, as they say, when there's a will, there's a way!
Whatever whatever whatever ---- this wasn't meant to be a pointed post, so I allowed myself to ramble, but let's stop that now! 

Post-Thesis period

Hmm -- typing a word here after a rather long time. Was busy writing and submitting my thesis --- which took me quite long by my expectations. And our paper on diffusion, which should have been on the arXiv, a few weeks ago is still not out. I do not think I can stand it if we are scooped again.
It is a rather tense period now, because it is not exactly clear when I will get my degree. The problem arises because unless I get my degree, I cannot apply for my Swiss visa. And once I have submitted my thesis, and come August, I will have to leave my accommodation in TIFR, i.e. the hostel. What a bother!
So what do I do? I have arranged for a visit at the IACS, from beginning of August, till mid-September. The trouble is, in the meanwhile, I might have to come to TIFR again for the defense and visa applications. Really!
And, I am going to be here anyway sometime in the end of September. Add to this, the uncertainty of when to book the ticket and the house where to stay on reaching Bern and you will have some idea of the trouble I am in. The fact that I do not have much savings of my own, and might have to borrow money for this process only makes things worse. And where have my savings gone, you'd ask? In harboring the sin of gluttony, of course!
Anyway, too much of self-depreciation. The other unfortunate thing is that I wanted to write an detailed account of the wonderful trip to Roopkund that we went on in May; but given the lack of time and pressed by the huge burden of things to do, I need to postpone. This increases (exponentially, in my case!) the probability of the important things I had wanted to write about; but it doesn't look like I can help it right now.
Will have to officially say goodbye to the life I had known for the past six years in two more weeks. Can't seem to understand the  gravity of the situation, though! So many things that had become a habit will just go away abruptly. Some of the nice atmosphere I had been exposed to, I will probably never know and feel again. Will I be happy to leave? Not entirely. Some things and some people, I'll really miss. Others, I'll be happy to gloss over.

Watched the movie, Love Actually. Initially, I thought that this was just a British remake of the Hollywood move Valentine's Day. Very soon I found out that was not the case. This was a romantic comedy maybe back in 2003 by Richard Curtis. It portrays many stories in parallel; love stories. The humour  was different, very British, of course; but very fun and likable. The vision draws from the scene at the airport when you are witnessing an arrival: there is always so much happiness around. Something that I have witnessed and experienced! Really, we are really messed up creatures ;) Anyway, before I forget, I must mention that the last scene of the Hindi movie Jaane tu...Ya Jaane na was adapted from one of the scenes of this movie, when this little boy runs in the airport terminal to profess his love to his sweetheart.
One the whole, this is one of those feel good movies!

The Ring of Solomon

Have just finished reading the new book (relatively new, since it came out in 2010) by Jonathan Stroud, The Ring of Solomon. The title will tell a lot to those who have already read the Bartaemius trilogy: yes, its about the famous ring that Solomon had; which could apparently control so many ferocious demons.
You've already heard about this ring in the Trilogy when Bartaemius claims to have spoken with Solomon himself; but here in this book things get very nasty. But, brilliantly written: now in my opinion, has hugely surpassed Harry Potter.
I only that he goes on writing about other episodes from Bartaemius' life.
And a book of this goes much beyond what the story is supposed to tell. Invariably, to understand the settings better, I mess with the actual history of the story; and in the process get to know a whole lot of things. For example,
take the The lost army of Cambyses. I ended up looking up quite a bit of the Egyptian history. And with this book; I happened to do quite a lot of reading about the region around Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Arabia and so on. This, reminds me how much I was interested in history. So many nations, so much culture, so much fighting! All very interesting.
Have ordered the Kindle. Will probably get it by the end of the week.
Before I completely forget, the last weekend was pretty nice. We went to Marine Drive, had ice-creams, actually rode on a horse-drawn cart in the Marine Drive; and had excellent pasta at Spaghetti Kitchen. Was definitely a day to remember.

Paul Sussman

After reading Umberto Eco, this person does deserve a mention. I finished reading the book, The lost army of Cambyses by Paul Sussman. It was a modern day novel but with tangible roots to the history and archaeology of Egypt. There is of course a lot of human element involved about finding a momentous discovery in the Great Sand Sea in Western Egypt. The historical background is pretty interesting. It was time of the great Persians, when they were having waves of expansion. The Persian ruler Cambyses had conquered Egypt; and had sent a great army of 50,000 men to defeat the Ammonians in what is now modern day Libya which started from Thebes, in Egypt. While on their way, the army was caught in a huge sandstorm and all of them perished. That's what happened, according to Herodotus. The book involves a finding of that lost army; and how the authorities use it to trap a notorious fundamentalist. Of course, for more drama, the entire army and the people who now know about it get lost and destroyed in another sandstorm. There is the main protagonist, Khalifa, who survives.
It has lot of learned remarks on history and archaeology; and inspired by it I actually dug out a translation of Herodotus' Inquiries. Interesting, hmmm! And it has to be; this person is an field archaeologist, so he manages to give a vivid description  to all the action that is going on there. Am reading the next book: The last secret of the Temple. Hope that this one's as interesting.

28 years after---

They have these horror movies 28 days later and 28 weeks later. Both horror movies. Maybe its time to make 28 years later; but this one is about cricket: the one in which we win the World Cup, obviously! Last Saturday was magnificient; watched the match with Lob in his guest house room; but the only regret that I will
evermore have is to have missed the biggest party in the world. So many people went to Marine Drive after the match ended. I wonder why it didn't come to our mind. The only interesting thing that I did is to go out with the folks next day to have brunch at Theobroma and watch a movie (Sucker Punch) after that.

But it was fun!

Anyway, have completed a first version of the synopsis, which I want to give Rajiv to read tomorrow. Writing this stuff destroyed two weeks of my time; much beyond my expectations. And I have to hurry; but I hurry too much then I have to leave TIFR soon as well keeping me straddled at some undecided place as a visitor. Creepy! And on top of that parents behaving like children; what a dismal thing it is. And today, dunno why, but spent a lot of time on YouTube watching a lot of romantic videos. Hell, they distract me; draw me to another world, full of risks, wonderful feelings, emotions, actions and what not!

Didn't want to make an abrupt end; but unfortunately can't go on much longer. But before I finish, let me mention this author Umberto Eco. After Swastik-da mentioned a book of his that he was reading, The name of the rose, I got hold of the e-copy; and it was so obsessive that I finished it in two days. The plot is historical thriller; and therefore a perfect match for my taste. A new book is going to come out, The Prague Cemetery. And thats when the kindle comes in.
After deliberating a lot, I think I should get an e-book reader. I mean, I keep on reading these e-copies shamelessly; I should try to protect my eyes. And I have my
whole contingency untouched! Well, well, we'll see.

Been quite busy for the last month. The screening-mass paper finally came out on the arXiv and was submitted (and accepted!) in Phys Rev D. So, I'm quite happy about that. And then there is the other work on diffusion coefficient that's going on: I worked out quite a couple of things that I am proud of. I mean, they were simple things; but it was a bit difficult to figure out exactly how things work out; but now that i have done them, I feel good about it. Finally there was the two week long Asian Lattice school, that was tiring, interesting and at the same time fattening, in the sense that I ate a lot of food during this period! As a part of the school dinners, we were taken out to Khyber and Indian Summers, both restaurants I've been wanting to go for ages. That's kind of it for now: the next few months will be taxing to the extreme; finish writing the synopsis and the thesis; and simultaneously finish all the work remaining on the diffusion constant project. Then getting some immediate results on the project with Shailesh, Nilmani and Anyi will be the next goal: at least if we could do the transfer matrix stuff; it would be quite cool. Then have to start on two different things with Saumen: lots of things to do ahead, I'm very excited!

Wine Tasting

This was my first experience of the sort; and a magnificent one to say the least. It was a place for wine-tasting on the first floor of Rampart Row. Integrated with the Kala-Ghoda festival, the deal was simple and attractive: you had to pay 300 bucks and for that you got unlimited wine. What we soon found out was that pieces of bread, cheese, often stuck on sticks and dressed with olives and pineapple were regularly available. Slices of pizza were made and distributed: and they were pretty well made.
The entire experience went on very smoothly since Subho-da was there, and he would tell us which wines to have first and which ones to follow and about the reserves and so on. Since wines are my rather favorite drink items, let me describe the whole experience in some detail.
We started with the white wines, namely a Sauvignon Blanc. It is a dry white wine, and was pretty good to taste. Then we had many other white wines, mostly dry and less in sugar, like chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon and several more which I do not remember at the moment. It turns out that these are all brand of grapes, mostly named by the regions of France where they are mostly cultivated. It also turns out that you always need to go for the white wines first, and only later can/should you have the red ones. Once you go to red, its almost impossible to come back. Well, I do not have such sophisticated tastes to claim that I see and understand all these differences, but I still can make out strong good wines from mild ones, and good ones from bad! :)!
There were several other things that I got to learn. Firstly, that in session on wine tasting, you should have water (ideally, also gargle a bit with water) before tasting the next wine. This act removes traces of the previous wine from your mouth. Also perform a similar ablution with the glass. Some people I found were actually, washing the glass with the wine they were going to taste, in order to completely remove traces of the other wine. Well, I hope I never go to that extent. Anyway, sloshing: red wine typically needs to be sloshed. This causes the wine to breathe, or in more scientific terms, "get oxidized". This often dramatically changes the taste of the wine for the better. Another practice is swirling. This is mainly intended to see the strains of wine as it slides down the glass. If it slides down slowly leaving streaks, it means the wine has high sugar content. A wine with less sugar should fall down rather smoothly without leaving streaks. That's a lot of stuff to know!
We gradually made the transition to the red wines, through a rose wine. I had a Vermont (I hope I got this correctly), which was sweetish. I found out that I liked the sweetish wines as well, in fact probably a tad more than the usual! Besides there was a sweet and mellow wine called Indian Nectar from the Pause wines that was very nice. A Temperanillo was a strong and  less sugary wine from this company. Shiraz is another brand which is very nice, but at the moment I can't recall it's taste. Then there was this concept of "reserves", which is usually a wine from a very good variety of grapes from some very good harvest in a particular year. At the very end, we had gone to the reserves: from where there was no coming back. Other wines wouldn't simply taste any good after that!
We also saw a wine preserver. They come in two varieties, and the need to preserve is evident. Prepared and processed wine is stored in vacuumed bottles. If its kept exposed for a long time, it simply gets fermented to vinegar, and then even though you can use it for cooking, drinking is out of the question. Hence, the need to preserve it. There were two varieties: one cheaper, intended for home use and could preserve it for several days, while the other, mainly intended for use in restaurants and stuff, could preserve for a week or more, and cost around 35K. WOW! So much to know. We also found out that decent Indian made wines are now available for around ~500-600 rupees a bottle. It really does seem that the Indian wine market is opening up.
Well, I spend two and half hours of blissful time there. I came back a bit early, to discuss something about work. The others stayed longer. But by far, this was the best experience I had with wines in India so far!

KalaGhoda

KalaGhoda are festival is one of the major attraction catcher in South Mumbai. Set in Kala Ghora, sanwiched in between  Fort and Asiatic Society, its a small but very downtown place where many sort of art can be seen displayed. Loads of people come here during the festival. There are music programs, theater, folk dance, movie screenings and a variety of other programs. Anyway, for further descriptions there is the internet.
Today was my second visit to this festival. The place was thriving with people with each sight vying for your eye. But the nicest experience today was the music program, a classical vocal and instrumental, a bhajan. It was a wonderful experience of very masterful vocal combined with melodious instrumentals enthralling a vast audience filling the numerous steps of the Asiatic society against the backdrop of the Bombay Stock Exchange blocking the increasingly darkening sky of dusk. And I'll leave you with that.

Reading Rybakov ....2

Yeah, this is my second post on Rybakov and his book "Children of Arbat". The first part in the trilogy: next comes Fear and then Dust and Ashes. And I must read the book, "The Thaw" by Ilya Ehrenberg. But lets come back to this book.
Well, as I said last time this is about a group of Moscow youths who grow up in a system which they idealize and which in turn, represses them. Unique! There is Sasha, who gets exiled for doing nothing wrong, but his exile is connected with arresting some other people. But you know, that part is the tragedy. Lots of people got repressed for no reason, for just being associated with someone the administration did not like.
The most fascinating aspect of the book is that it presents to the reader, two diametrically opposite views: that of the Soviet Man and that of the Administration. The Soviet Man is best personified with Sasha, Varya, Nina and their friends. They have the ideal within them to bring about a change: sacrifice for achieving something great, their faith in the Party and the ideals of socialism.

But what does the Party do? People like Sergei Kirov (who I think is depicted as a hero in this book) who understand the people and value their support continue to work tirelessly. But what can they do when Stalin is obsessed with the centralization of power? The book does paint a chilling psychological picture of Stalin by carefully analyzing his thought processes. Stalin was completely opposed to decentralization of power: all strings to himself,---a very dangerous game! But anyway, that's all history. But I just do wonder at times: that if people like Kirov had their way, not working at the very top, but among the people, helping and guiding them along, whether the experiment would have succeeded?
Did the rule of Stalin destroy the socialism in Russia? I think it did.

Simultaneously, we should remember that what the Russian people were also looking for was a complete change in society: where the individual would live, not only for self, but also for the community. The order matters, of course. Stalinist reversed the order, and committed numerous atrocities in that ideal. On the contrary, exploiting the other extreme, nations have become lousy capitalists.
A balance is necessary...but at which point? Next stop: The Communist Manifesto.

The book ends with two different points again. On one hand, Kirov is murdered by NKVD on the orders of Stalin (http://www.brushtail.com.au/july_04_on/kirov_assassination.html) and on the other Sasha realizes that he will probably never go back to Moscow. But in spite of that he has hopes: hopes for a life, a future, because for the first time, Varya has written him a letter.

Reading Rybakov

Very recently, I came across this book, Children of the Arbat by Anatoli Rybakov. Its a book about the Stalinist Russia in the mid-1930's when the socialist revolution was in full swing. An amazing book!
As you know, I do have a fascination for Soviet Russia. Primarily, because its so different from anything I have seen. Thats why I used to like the book, The Last Frontier by Alistair MacLean so much. I thought he was amazing when he wrote about the viewpoint of the anguished Russian leadership at Western Intrusion.
And now this! This book is a work of pure genius. It follows the life of several Muscovite adolescents, from the locality of Arabat which was considered to be a place of intellectuals in the monarchial and Soviet Russia. Pushkin had his house there. Remarkably, it also analyzes the thoughts and actions of Stalin and his other comerades during that time.
What Lenin did, what Stalin did, the Second Russian revolution (not called by that name, though!) and maybe why he did it are explained brilliantly in detail. What the new generations thought about their leadership, their society, their role and duty in forming what they thought be a new world order forms the backbone of the book. What is the individual and what is the society: it is a work of pure genius. Let me quote a paragraph from it that I liked:

"The criminals are scum," Vodolya said, "Degenerates and murderers. They'd betray their own comerade for a bowl of camp soup. They're the systems main support, they help our 'administrators'. Kill your wife and you get eight years, and then they knock off four for good behaviour. But take a pair of shoe soles out of the factory and they'll give you ten years."

Really, what an administration!

Catching up

Hi, ---Long time no see. Was busy in quite a few things. There was the trip to Rajasthan to attend the DAE- conference. What was most interesting was the three day holiday we took after the conference got over, in which time we visited Jaisalmer, the Desert and Jodhpur. Why I write "the Desert" separately, is because while at Jaisalmer we took a desert safari, in which we had a camel ride to see the sunset, and were able to spend the night in a hut in a camp in the middle of the desert; and could get up very early in the morning and go and watch the sunrise in the biting cold! This place was about 50 km from Jaisalmer, and it was a very memorable experience. Want to have a look at the pictures? Here is the link:
http://picasaweb.google.com/cygnus2/LandOfTheGoldenFort#
The last day of our stay in Jaisalmer was mainly spend in visiting the Golden Fort, about which there is a very famous film in bengali. Why its called the Golden Fort is a mystery I'll leave you to figure out! The visit to the fort, though short, was exotic. Once again, you should be able to see the pictures from the web-site.
The next place of visit was Jodhpur. The most remarkable thing about Jodhpur is the Mehrangarh fort. Even in this second visit to the place, I could not help but be awed by the royalty so deeply ingrained in the fort. Simply majestic; and superb! This time though I had a audio guide with me that helped to appreciate the fort and the things displayed in it much more. To satisfy your curiosity, without much trouble you can find out where the pictures are.
Then was the trip back to Jaipur and in the half of a day we had there, before catching our plane to Mumbai, we visited the Jaigarh fort and the Amber palace. Both very good, but seen before: the last time I had come there was in Quark Matter 2008; nearly 3 years ago.
The trip to these places in Rajasthan was extremely memorable. It was a short tour, very hectic but very enjoyable. All those days we were travelling in bus on the every other day. In retrospect, even the Jaipur stay during the conference was cool. Our hotel was in a very happening place in the town and we used to eat out nearly every day. In particular, there was this very nice kabab place, which we simply adored!

Back in TIFR was a time to complete applications and keep waiting. A very frustrating phase, punctuated only by the arrival of Arnab-da: the week in which I had great fun. Among other things, we would go out every day! The last day on which he left, he gave us a treat in Cafe Moshe; which had just amazing food. Kabir, Kusum and I went and it was a whole lot of fun! There was also one day spent at the WichLatte and one at ZafferBhai + Mocha, which was equally good.

All in all every thing has turned out well. I will finally be joining Bern as a post-doctoral associate. The group there is pretty good and I am looking forward to join there. In the meanwhile however, a herculean task awaits me: write the synopsis and the thesis and get the degree! And then in the months it takes to get me a work permit there in Switzerland, finish the remaining projects and maybe start new collaborations here.

Well, lets hope for the best!

Merry Chirstmas

Merry Christmas to all of you! Today went to the church--the Afghan church, yes. A strange feeling occurred. When the priest conducting the mass asked us to observe silence and pray, a strange realization came over to me. It is primarily that I have been pretty much selfish all this time. I have been working hard trying to do good in my subject, making myself worth more to the others, being polite to my friends and others (and ignoring some people), trying to have fun---but all this is directed for me. When have I stopped thinking about me, and honestly worried for other people. I remember, that in schools when we would sign a lot of autograph books, I would write that my ambition in life was to be someone who could bring smiles on others faces. Where is all that? All a farce? Seems so; and I am not even remorseful, not even ashamed that all this brings me no closer to being an selfish arrogant person--the same repulsive animal that I think some others are. Try I will, but will I succeed? Will I leave my Saturday Christmas weekend, to go out and be a Santa Claus bringing gifts to under privileged children? Thats precisely where my hollowness lies!

the weekend like no other

I seem to have developed a penchant for declaring topics with the word weekend in them, but I am largely forced to do so by the content of such blogs, not mere exhibition. Anyway, the last weekend of November was --- a weekend like no other!
By and large, the plan was that we would be going to Ajanta-Ellora. Yes, after so many deserted thoughts, and discarded attempts, here was a reality! All through the middle of the week, I was busy applying and feeling cozy that the renormalization issues for the diffusion project had worked out. Thursday morning I didn't check the arXiv. I didn't come to know until Saumen-da told me. Our work was already out. Or so we thought! It wasn't long before we realized that whatever form the work had come out, wasn't the one we were aiming for. Thus, our analysis is still more or less, in the clear! But it is imperative that we complete it soon; other people are working on it.
And about Ellora and Ajanta--they were majestic and mystic; forlorn and extragavagant, but none more awe-inspiring than the Kailash Temple, an architectural feat to compete the best in the world. Built from top-down, it is carved from a single rock. So much genius, so much labour, and so much faith involved--it makes me shudder for a moment when I think about it.
It took us about a whole afternoon to cover the Kailash Temple, then after a lunch, we saw Aurangzeb's tomb and Bibi-ki-maqbara in the evening. The former was a very simple affair, with the Emperor having declared at some time that he would want to be buried like a common man, under the starry sky. The Bibi-ka-maqbara was hardly fascinating. An imitation of Taj Mahal, of course; but the designs and the carvings on it were also pretty mundane.
Next day was the time for the majestic Ajanta. All of them are carved on a horse-shoe shaped mountain flanking a deep gorge. They are mostly Buddhist, in contrast to Ellora which is mostly Hindu. Ajanta was bulit in the heyday of Buddhism in India. The colors and the paintings made in the caves are again, to say the least, finest of their kind in the world. I regret to see that they have deteriorated so. What they must have looked like when they were made, I cannot dare to dream about! We managed to cover all the caves, excepting cave 2, leaving time in the end to go up a sharp, steep cliff which offered a beautiful view of the caves on the other side from above.
The morning of the third day was spend in looking around the more important caves of Ellora. Some of the sculptures were so majestic and huge that it made me pause and wonder at the conception of beauty. You are invited to see my pictures in Picasa.
The afternoon was devoted to the Daulatabad fort, before the long ride home. The Fort is pretty big, and was famous for being impregnable. It was initially constructed by the rulers of Devgiri, and until treacherously taken by Ala-ud-din Khilji, stood proudly looking around. It was also the site that Mohammed-bin-Tughlaq tried to shift his capital to from Delhi. He was the one who called it Daulatabad. We took a guide to show us around the maze that was constructed to confound enemies who would have broken the last lines of defence through the moat into the heart of the fort. Totally rocking! What extreme defenses, what clever scheming to get rid of the enemies. In the pitch darkness of the maze, air would be blown to lure the armies to some spot, where hot oil would be poured on them.
The effectiveness of the trip was enhanced by the fact that we stayed in the Hotel Kailash, where the shooting of the film Kailashe Kelenkari took place. A Satyajit Ray book was shot by his son, Sandip Roy. The hotel is situated about 5 minutes walking distance from the entrance of the Kailash Temple; and from the lawn in front of our rooms one could see some of the far flung caves of Ellora. Being so far away from town the place was calm and quiet, free of noise and more importantly, light pollution!
I was also acquainted with the Lonely Planet series, since we went by the caves with proper references making a note of what was the interesting features to see. This is one value that I had not appreciated so much earlier--you see a place not only as a building but also as a symbol of what is represented there and its history. The light and sound show of Golconda fort was one such memorable experience 4 years back.
And yes, about long driving. I had never appreciated that before at all, since I had never done it before. No, I didn't drive. But since I sat beside the driver for quite a long time, I was instrumental to some extent in ensuring that he didn't feel sleepy by making small conversation, and much more importantly not falling asleep myself.
Together with the fact that our work was safe, this was a very nice trip!

Nuclear Physics and the non-relativistic conformal fixed point and all that!

Nuclear physics is sometimes considered to be a dead subject sometimes, by some people. I dont think that is the case. Its merely not fashionable for many people. And why not? Maybe it does not have high sounding terminology embedded in it. Anyway, in this entry I will try to argue that it is indeed interesting,--very interesting; and some very cool features can be seen in it. Since I am not a nuclear physicist, my description will be rudimentary.
Lets come to the concept of non-relativistic conformal field theories. Suppose you have a set of fermions interacting with each other. Then there is a phase shift associated with the incoming and outgoing fermion wavefunctions. Now imagine, that the interactions between the fermions can be tuned by tuning some coupling, say the magnetic field. For strong coupling, the fermions could be bound into fermions, while for arbitrary weak coupling they would form a Cooper-pair type bound state. The scattering length changes sign in these two phases, and at the point of transition it diverges, giving rise to universal physics. Thats the non-relativistic conformal fixed point I was referring to.
Now about the nuclear physics connection. The nucleon-nucleon (N-N) scattering length is of prime importance in nuclear physics. For real world, its small and negative for the pion phase shift in a particular channel. It is believed that tuning the quark mass would change the sign of the pion phase shift! The quark mass plays the role of the coupling in the previous example.
I am not yet aware of the implications of this interesting phenomena, but I do intend to find out.
True, I have glossed over the details, but I will add a more complete picture as and when I get it.

While the renormalization issue in the Diffusion coefficient seems to have been sorted out to a large extent. my efforts at reweighting still seems to be unsuccessful. I refuse to believe that in a SU(2) theory I can't reweight beta's that differ by 0.02 from each other, whether in the confined or in the deconfined phase! The smearing business is coming out more or less okay: while I am not doing anything obviously wrong, I may not be doing enough to improve the results.
Today ran about 5.5 rounds in the Kohli stadium. Quite an achievement for me!
And what is going to happen about the screening-mass paper? And post-doc positions? Really, most annoying, not to know!

Ground and Scattering states

One of the things that I gained a bit more understanding of during the course of this Nuclear conference that is going on now is the issue of the scattering and bound states, which I am going to say here in a very hand-waving way.
The point is the issue that the S-matrix of a QFT that you calculate on the lattice is very different from the one that in continuum. For sure. But then, how can we get information about the continuum S-matrix. The seminal work of Luscher showed how this can be done. He argued this information lies in how the energy levels scale. If it is a bound state then there is scaling by exp(-m*L) where m is the mass of the bound state and L the lattice size. On the other hand, if it is a scattering state then it will scale by 1/L^3. Thus, a S-matrix with only poles gives the information about the full spectrum of the continuum theory with both the bound and scattering states. There's some bit about the momentum dependence of the phase shifts that come in somewhere, but I dont know that yet. Will hopefully learn that while doing this project with Nilmani, Anyi and Shailesh.

Another nice movie: Udaan. Watched it yesterday. Somehow it resonated with me for obious reasons. If only I could get free like that right now. But alas, no! Only an ominous patience for me.

the Harry Potter weekend

Saw the movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow (the first part). A reasonable movie with nice sceneries that tried to remind me of the LOTR, with some success. This seemed to be a faithful reproduction of the book. But enjoyed it a lot!
Most of the weekend was spend doing rather useless work on making the web-page for a nearly finished project, and making tables in tex. Throw in a couple of fine lectures by Evgeny Epelbaum on the Chiral Effective Field theories, and there you have my entire schedule. The lecture was saturday was mostly on EFT with pions, which I have an idea of and could mostly follow. But on sunday, he described EFT for nucleons by integrating out the pion degrees of freedom: the procedure seemed very interesting, but I was unable to follow most of it. There is some effective range expansion that needs to be understood.
The lectures on Efimov effect also seemed very interesting---much to the extent of trying something in one of the projects I am doing!
Looking forward for a small break soon. Will let know if everything goes well.

Ramona and Beezus

If it does happen that you are feeling down and depressed, that sick feeling inside your stomach that refuses to manifest, Ramona and Beezus could go some way to comforting you. Nothing like Bridge to Teribithia, this one simply focuses on the lives of two sisters in mid-Western America and the people that matter to them. I went on waiting for something great to happen, some exciting and out of the place adventure to happen, but none did. It was ordinary, far too ordinary. But it wasn't until the end that I realized that among the ordinary was really hidden something extraordinary. The movie was timeless and placeless: you could have set the plot to be somewhere else and at some period of time, and yet it would be as good. Had I been in any other mood, I would have been ecstatic when the movie ended. I was too upset over something, but this movie went far to lift my spirits.
Of course, I have seen lots of movies better than this, but this had some quality to it that clicked at the right point of time at the right situation.

Hello after a long time

Quite a long time has passed: the QCD conference at the University of Calcutta is over (thankfully my talk went well!), the Durga Pujas have come and passed and so has my visit to home. I have finished watching most of the South Park episodes, which I think is a great achievement by itself! Have started applications for Post-Doc positions. Work going on for several projects! A rather strenuous time for me!
Will try to write more soon.