Program

Time	Speaker
2:00-2:40pm	Aalhad Bhatt
2:45-3:25pm	Aman Sharma
3:30-4:10pm	Ashley Chraya
4:15-5:00pm	Parth Kapoor

Abstracts

Aalhad Bhatt

Mathematical Modelling of Biological Systems

Why would a talk on theoretical biology belong in a physics symposium? When dealing with many physical systems, an important question is that of time evolution; given information about the system at a given time, what will happen in the future? It turns out that this problem is also one that is encountered frequently in biology. Unlike the idealised models one encounters in physics classrooms, even some of the simplest models in biology are not exactly solvable, i.e. one can’t simply obtain a function where one can input time into it and get a desired output. Apart from analysing the model, simply creating a model worth analysing can be a challenge. In my previous summer project, I had done some reading related to this topic and will speak a bit about it.

Starting with a light dose of the philosophy of modelling, I will discuss some basic models in population ecology along with standard techniques to analyse them. One such technique is that of using the phase plane, which makes an appearance in the Hamiltonian mechanics of a 1D system.

Expect to see lots of amateurishly made pretty graphs and topics explained in a way that requires no prerequisites (though basic calculus will help).

Aman Sharma

Performing topological Quantum computation using Majorana Fermions

Superconducting qubits used for Quantum computation have a short coherence time due to which they perform very little computations before they loose their Quantum behaviour due to regular perturbations from the environment.

Majorana Fermions are non-abelian particles and can be used to create topologically protected qubits. These qubits do not decohere easily due to perturbations from the surrounding.

Ashley Chraya

Action Principle for Gravitation and the problem of well-posedness

I discuss the criteria that must be satisfied for the well-posed action principle for gravity. I further explain the role of Gibbons-Hawking-York type boundary terms in the action. More specifically, the objective is to understand 1) why it is not correct to require the vanishing of variation of normal derivatives of the metric on the boundary 2) why the induced metric has to be fixed on the boundary to get field equations, and 3) what is the relationship of components of the induced metric and the number of degrees of freedom of the system.

Parth Kapoor

Constraining Cosmological Parameters Using Statistical Methods

Several dark energy models exist, and not enough of them have been falsified. In all of their mathematical formulations, there are free parameters that have no bounds that arise from theory. So, we can use observed data to constraint these free parameters.

Vivek Shukla

Exclusion Zone in Water

Professor G. Pollack’s experiments on water have shown that, when bulk water is in contact with a hydrophilic metallic interface, the water shows an exclusion zone ordered water layer that repels large objects such as colloidal particles and even heavy ions. The talk will intend to shed some light on what this ordered water layer is, from where does it derive its energy from, why we must bother about it. There are no pre-requisites required for this talk, and it would be a pretty lightweight and fun talk.