Students
If you would like to schedule a meeting with me, please see my calendar to find out when I am available. Send me an email the evening before of the day you would like to meet
Some tips for all students who plan to work with me
On writing and presentation of results
- How to make a presentation with impact
- Writing well: Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is an excellent handbook of writing style.
- After you have got the general idea on how to write well, a useful guideline to follow is Mark Twain's witticism: "If in doubt, strike it out".
Instrumentation for Particle Physics
Basic concepts
Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A/B (NIM A/B) is the premier journal devoted to detectors and instrumentation in particle physics. This special issue consists of review articles of advanced detector and instrumentation technologies with a view towards future upgrades.
Our group focuses on wide bandgap semiconductor detectors. So please read up on (a) wide bandgap semiconductors (b) radiation detectors and (c) radiation before coming to see me to discuss a research project
Though you will see from the list of past students' work below that we often take up projects for their general coolness factor.
[MUST READ] Lecture Notes by Helmuth Spieler on Design of readout electronics:
- Analog and digital design
- Timing considerations.
- See also Helmuth Spieler's homepage with many other tutorials.
- An expanded version of the lecture notes has been published in e-book format Semiconductor Detector Systems by Oxford University Press (2007). It is available through the IIT-B central library. Chapter 9 of the e-book is especially usefully once you start building things in the lab.
- Semiconductor radiation detectors: device physics by Gerhard Lutz (Springer 1999) is another good book on the intrinsic detector response of semiconductors. Paper copies are available for issue in the IITB central library.
Good practices in Electronics Design and Circuit fabrication
Discrete large components are so old-school! Give in to the fact that you will have to work with SMD components. Here are a couple of video tutorials on soldering SMD PCB's:
Here are some guidelines for good PCB design.
- David Jones' elementary PCB design tutorial See also his website
- Some thoughts on how to choose a solder finish for your PCB - by the professionals
- Tim Jervis' note on electromagnetic radiation considerations in PCB design
- Cambridge Semiconductor application note on PCB layout (focuses on power supply)
- Handling high currents here, and here - yes the trace width matters! and there are rules about it!
Advanced topics on stray effects, capacitive loading from PCB traces and such
- Texas Instruments tech note by John Wu on precision Analog PCB design, with emphasis on how to avoid EMI pickup
- Texas Instruments guidelines for analog PCB circuit design (from the ebook OpAmps for Everyone)
- Analog Dialog 38-06 on how stray capacitive loading affects stability in opamp feedback circuits, and how to avoid it.
- Analog Dialog 12-83 on PCB trace layout for low noise analog and digital circuits (beware - an exhaustive/ing 97 pages!)
Advanced topics in RF and high frequency PCB design
- Super good tutorial notes on how to design PCB's for RF (~ GHz) range signal transmission from the friendly folks at Jefferson Lab Accelerator division, who hosted the much beloved, first EDA software P-CAD until it was bought out by Altium.
-
Roger's white paper on selection of PCB substrate for high frequency applications
- Tech note on calculating geometry of PCB traces for specific high frequency and microwave applications
- Texas Instruments App Note AN08 on low power RF PCB design
Some fun:
- A visual tour of the Advanced Circuits mass PCB fabrication facility
- A rambunctious video tour of the SparkFun science fair.
Upcoming events:
A list of upcoming scientific conferences and summer/winter schools can be found here (Physics) and here (Silicon detectors)
Resources for Learning Physics
This section does not endorse any particular resource. I have listed a few places where you can get a good, reliable basic education in Physics. Apart from attending classes and solving exam problems, that is!- The Theoretical Minimum A course taught at Stanford University by Leonard Susskind. Covers all areas of Physics. Video lectures are available. The corresponding e-book has problems that are insightful. IIT-B students would initially scoff at the (apparently) low level of problems. But try them out and see!
I have had the good fortune of working with some exceptionally gifted students. This is a list of my students and research assistants, past and present:
Project Assistants
| Researh Assistant | Tether | Year | Now at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shubham Tanwar |
|
2018-19 | IBEC, Barcelona, Spain Wrote this spectacular career column for Nature on "What the lockdown taught me" |
Graduate
| PhD | Tether | Year | Now at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pankaj Chetry (IITB-Monash) |
|
SNDY | Micron Semiconductor |
| Rupa Jeena (Prime Minister's Research Fellow) | current | ||
| Elizabeth George |
|
2022 | Queen Mary, College of London |
| Kousik Naskar |
|
2022 | Institute of Physics, Bhubaneshwar |
| Sonia Sarkar (co-guided in CRNTS with Prof. Kasturi Saha (EE)) | current | ||
| Anuj Bhatla (co-guided in CRNTS with Prof. Kasturi Saha (EE)) | current |
| MSc Theses | Tether | Year | Now at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Akhil Premkumar
"Silicon detector test bench using the Beetle ASIC" Winner of IIT Bombay B. Gandhi Memorial award for best Master's thesis - 2017 |
2017 | UC San Diego | Nitish Nayak
"Low noise ultrafast readout electronics for detector systems" |
|
2016 | UC Irvine |
| Abhirup Chaudhuri,
"Design of linear particle accelerators" Winner of IIT Bombay B. Gandhi Memorial award for best Master's thesis - 2011 |
2011 | VECC, Kolkata |
| M.Tech - Dual degree program in Nanoscience | Tether | Year | Now at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pradumn Kumar,
"Measurement of radiation pressure from a laser beam" Winner of the URA-1 award for best Master's research This work was done at the peak of covid lockdown - Pradumn was among a handful of students allowed to stay on campus to complete his experiments. |
2021 | Jaguar Landrover ML group | |
| Ruturaj Apte,
"Characterization of charge carrier properties in single crystal diamond" |
2015 | Rutgers | |
| Prithika Vageeswaran,
Development of diamond detectors for radiation hard environments |
2014 | Deutche Bank AG | |
| Sakshi Jain,
"Algorithms for jet finding in high energy particle collisions at the LHC" |
2012 | U.C. Berkeley⇒Apple⇒LinkedIn |
Undergraduate
| Senior BTech Project | Tether | Year | Now at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheryl Mathew co-guided with Prof. Shiraz Minwalla (TIFR)
"Large D Black Hole Membrane Paradigm" |
2018 | Perimeter Institute Canada ⇒ Inst. of Math Science, Chennai | |
| Thariq Shanawas (EE) co-guided with Prof. Kasturi Saha (EE)
"Microstrip RF antenna design for magnetic field excitation of NV centers in diamond" |
2018 | UC Boulder | |
| Anchal Gupta
"Characterization of charge carrier properties in diamond detectors" |
2016 | Caltech | |
| Harsh Kabra
Trigger systems for the electronic readout of particle detectors |
2016 | ||
| Sreesh V.
"Characterization of noise in electronic systems" |
2016 | Okinawa? | |
| Adwait Dongare
"Low noise High speed readout system for a diamond radiation detector" |
2014 | CMU (ECE) | |
| Chaitali Joshi, (co-supervised with Prof. Swaroop Ganguly, EE)
"Density Functional Theory calculations of the effect of silver nanoclusters on the refractive index of photo-voltaic materials" |
2013 | Cornell (Applied Physics)⇒Columbia | |
| Mukund Madhav,
"Jet-track correlations in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions in the CMS detector at LHC". |
2012 | MIT (PhD)⇒Broad Institute | |
| Aditya Pathak,
"High pT Drell-Yann processes in the CMS detector at LHC " |
2011 | MIT (PhD)⇒TU Viennna (postdoc) | |
| Abhirup Nath,
"Semiconductor particle detectors for the ALICE Forward Calorimeter" |
2011 | Microsoft Research⇒Serial entrepreneur |
| Junior year Seminar | Tether | Year | Now at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shruti Shyam
Semiconductor detector design and fabrication | 2016 | ETH Zurich | |
| Aditi Udupa
Fast readout of a scintillator detector using Silicon photodiodes | 2014 | UIUC (EE) | |
| Chaitali Joshi
"Solid-state scintillator detector based on fast electronics" | 2012 | Cornell(Applied Physics) | |
| Paritosh Meihar
"Solid-state scintillator detector based on fast electronics" | 2011 | ||
| Anvay Upadhye
"Solid-state scintillator detector based on fast electronics" | 2011 | Osaka University, 2012 | |
| Sukhdeep Singh,
"Semiconductor particle detectors" | 2010 | ||
| Mishel George,
"Semiconductor Particle detectors" | 2009 | ||
| Harish Ramadas,
"Experimental aspects of gravitational wave detection" | 2009 | Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics |
| Other Research projects | Tether | Year | Now at | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Analog Design gang 2016-17. Yashvi Sharma, Vedant Basu, Shobhna Misra, Tariq Shahnawas (EE), Chaitanya Tuckley Futzing around with low noise GHz bandwidth analog circuits |
2016-17 | |||
| Saurabh Mogre, Niladri Chatterjee
Ultra low noise semiconductor detectors | 2012 - 13 | Summer 2013 intern at Tsukuba Univ. Japan Saurabh now at UC San Diego (biophysics); Niladri at UC Berkeley Physics (CS) |
Contact:
Department of Physics,
IIT Bombay
Powai, Mumbai 400 076
Tel: +91-22-25767591
Fax: +91-22-25767552
Email: pradeepsarin[at]iitb.ac.in
My calendar