Department of Physics Hosts In-House Symposium 2024
November 29-30, 2024
The Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru held its annual in-house symposium on the 29th and 30th of November 2024 at the department auditorium. The event brought together an enthusiastic gathering of faculty members, students, and post-doctoral researchers to discuss and showcase the diverse research activities taking place within the department.
The symposium featured a comprehensive schedule of talks and poster sessions, with a total of 70 posters and 24 talks. Faculty members and students alike presented their research, fostering an environment of academic exchange and collaboration.
The sessions covered a wide range of physics sub-fields, from soft matter and hard condensed matter to astrophysics and plasma physics,[AS1] providing attendees with a broad spectrum of current research topics.
A highlight of the symposium was the Anil Kumar Memorial Lecture, held in memory of the late Prof. Anil Kumar. This year’s invited speaker was Prof. G. V. Pavan Kumar from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. His talk, “Hot Brownian Dynamics Driven by Structured Light,” explored the use of structured light to probe soft matter systems and non-equilibrium physics, particularly focusing on light-absorbing colloids.
The symposium also emphasized student involvement, with poster sessions allowing students from various stages of their academic careers to present their research. Topics ranged from random motion in algae and excitons in 2D heterostructures to the entanglement entropy of strange metals and observations using magnetic white dwarfs.
In the closing session, two students from the Integrated PhD batch of 2023, Kamalendu Dinda and Saranga Sreenadha, were honoured with the M. A. Viswamitra Award for Best 1st Year Int. PhD student for the academic year 2023-24. They obtained the highest CGPA in their batch.
The symposium provided a thorough overview of the cutting-edge research conducted within the department, demonstrating the department’s commitment to advancing a wide range of fields in physics.
Text: Phanindra Dewan
Photographs: Sumantra Sarkar and Phanindra Dewan
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