Lab Saha, Anshu Chatterjee and Prof. Pratik Majumdar from the Astroparticle Physics and Cosmology Division, SINP and their collaborators have analyzed data for a middle-aged, supernova remnant 3C 391 and improved the statistics. It shows that such supernova remnants are able to accelerate particles to TeV-scale energies. The work has been published in Astrophysical Journal 790 (2014) 65.
Gamma-ray TS map of the 3C 391 neighborhood with a bin size of 0.01 × 0.01 deg. The blue contours show the X-ray data from Suzaku observatory, where 3 contours represent 14, 29, 43 counts. The yellow crosses and circles represent the 2nd Fermi-LAT catalog sources and the black cross and circle is the GeV source from the 2nd Fermi-LAT catalog corresponding to SNR 3C 391. Two red diamonds represent the two masers detected.
Installation of a Clean Room facility (Room No 125)
A Clean Room facility has been set up for preparing samples in an environment where the concentration of airborne particles is kept within specified limits. Semiconductor grade clean areas of 20m2, 31m2 and 6.28m2 have been prepared of classes 100, 1000 and 10000 respectively. The temperatures of the class 100 and 1000 areas are respectively 21±1C and 23±1C, whereas the relative humidity in both the areas is 45±2.5%. Besides, UV photolithography set up, rf sputtering unit, vacuum coater, plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition and inductively coupled plasma-based reactive ion etch facility etc. were also positioned in the clean room. This facility has been developed by Profs. Supratic Chakraborty and Madhusudan Roy.
Two-loop QCD corrections relevant for LHC physics
A subdominant production channel of Higgs' boson plus jet from the annihilation process of bottom quark and anti-bottom quark has been calculated to two loops order in QCD by Prof. Prakash Mathews and his collaborators. Such studies are essential in finding out properties of Higgs' boson recently found in LHC at CERN. The work has been published in Journal of High Energy Physics, 08 (2014) 075.
Installation and running of a Beamline facility
A beamline at the Photon Factory synchrotron radiation facility in Japan has been successfully set up. The project is sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India, with Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics as the nodal center for its implementation. It is conceived as a multipurpose beamline to accommodate various planned facilities. At present, the available facilities are (a) high resolution powder diffraction in ambient condition, (b) powder diffraction at low temperatures down to 10K, (c) powder diffraction at high temperatures up to 1200 K, (d) diffraction from single crystals and epitaxial multilayers, (e) x-ray reflectivity and diffuse scattering from solid surfaces and interfaces, (f) x-ray reflectivity, diffuse scattering and grazing incidence diffraction from liquid surface and liquid-liquid interfaces and (g) small angle x-ray scattering. Researchers from about 25 Indian institutes and universities have performed experiments in this facility. The successful installation and operation of this beamline has been recognized as a flagship cooperative activity between the two countries in the recent visit of the Indian Prime Minister Shri Narendra Damodardas Modi to Japan and a statement was included in the joint press release:
Recognizing the successful operation of the Indian Beam Line at High-Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) at Tsukuba as a flagship cooperative activity, both sides announced their decision to take forward this collaboration in structural materials science area to the second phase for the study of advanced materials. Profs. M. K. Sanyal, M. K. Mukhopadhyay, K. S. R. Menon and S. Bhunia are involved in this project.
A picture of the experimental setup consisting of two goniometers at Indian Beamline, BL-18B, Photon factory, KEK, Japan.
New Hyperon Equations of State for Supernovae and Neutron Stars
Supernovae are spectacular astronomical events. Understanding the fate of a massive star after the explosion (supernova) is a challenging open problem. These core collapse supernovae may either become a neutron star or a black hole. In this quest, the equation of state of dense matter plays an important role. In this work, a new table for equation of state (EoS table) involving exotic matter for core collapse supernovae and neutron stars has been developed. The table is available online for simulations and study of gravitational waves in neutron star mergers. The work done by Prof. Debades Bandyopadhyay and his collaborators have been published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 214 (2014) 22