Colloquia organized by Department of Physics
ALIGARH : The Department of Physics, Aligarh Muslim University organized a series of colloquia under its pioneering bimonthly educational programme organized by the Science Club of the department.
Prof. Mohammad Sajjad Athar, Chairman of the department, said that while delivering a talk on Disentangling Entanglement” under the first colloquium, Dr. SSZ Ashraf (Department of Physics) discussed what entanglement really is, why it is essentially a quantum mechanical concept, and how some big minds in the last century struggled to come to terms with it.
He discussed the role of Bell-type inequalities that depend on the entangled nature of states in sharply differentiating the world without entanglement (namely, the classical world) and the one with entanglement (namely, the quantum world).
Dr. Ashraf provided a coherent history of quantum mechanics that led to the work of three physicists who received the Nobel Prize in Physics 2022.
In the second colloquium, Mr. Mohammad Ful Hossain Sheikh, a Physics department alumnus, who is currently enrolled in the PhD programme in experimental high energy physics at the University of Kansas, USA, spoke on “High-Energy Neutrinos”.
He discussed the challenges related to the detection of ultra-high energy neutrinos and cosmic rays. Besides presenting a general overview of the radio neutrino detection techniques and various detectors, he shared his ambitions for improving antennas for future detector experiments. He also shed light on the Sir Syed Scholarship programme and urged the undergraduate and postgraduate students in physics to make efforts to avail the opportunity.
Prof. Rafael Coelho Lopes De Sa, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA delivered a talk on “Evolving Research Software towards Next-Generation High-Energy Physics Experiments” under the third colloquium. He described why the future discoveries in physics, notably in experimental particle physics, would depend critically on the development of Software for managing and analyzing huge data involved.
With special reference to the huge experiments like Large Hadron Collider in Geneva where the Higgs was discovered in 2012, and the HSF-India that he is a part of, Prof. Coelho emphasized the importance of setting up international research software collaborations to maximize the potential for scientific discovery.
He recommended an online resource https://hepsoftwarefoundation.org for initiating collaborations and identifying common research goals.
Ms. Sanskriti Agrawal, an undergraduate student and Convenor of the Science Club, said that the upcoming colloquium speakers include Dr. Haider Jafri, Dr. Nook Alam, Dr. Raktim Abir, Dr. Arif Mohd (all from AMU), Prof. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy (IIT, Delhi and Former Vice Chancellor, Hyderabad Central University) and Prof. Indumathi (Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai).