Mahendra Verma
Department of Physics, IIT Kanpur
mkv AT iitk.ac.in
Research interests:
Turbulence and nonlinear dynamics
Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence; Dynamo; Liquid metal MHD
Buoyancy driven turbulence; Thermal convection; Stably stratified turbulence
High performance computing
Nonequilibrium statistical physics; Solar and astrophysics
Awards Received:
Swarnajayanti fellowship (2006)
INSA Teachers Award (2016)
Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Cray HPC Award (2018)
J. C. Bose Fellowship (2023)
Sanjay Mittal Chair at IIT Kanpur (2019-2022)
Fellow of INSA, Indian Academy of Sciences, & National Science Academy, India.
Books written:
Practical Numerical Computing Using Python: Scientific and Engineering Applications (2021)
Energy Transfers in Fluid Flows: Multiscale and Spectral Perspectives(Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019)
Physics of Buoyant Flows: From Instabilities to Turbulence (World Scientific, 2018)
Introduction to Mechanics (Universitites Press, 2016)
Scientific codes developed in the group:
TARANG (Pseudospectral code for turbulence simulation. Scaled up to 196608 processors)
SARAS (Finite-difference code for turbulence simulation)
TEJAS (Electromagnetic solver based on FDTD method)
They are hosted at http://turbulencehub.org
Some video lectures
Physical Laws in Complex Multiscale World Lessons from Hydrodynamics
Emergence of Order in 2D Euler Turbulence, an Isolated System (at ICTS, 2022 )
Origin of Time Asymmetry and Friction in Multiscale Systems (talk given in Ind. Acad. Sci.)
Global Warming, Butterfly Effect & Climate Change (Nobel Prize, 2021)
Is There a Universal Theory of Turbulence? (talk given in Coventry University)
Energy Flux in Nonequilibrium Systems (talk given in JNU symposium on "Current Trends in Non-Equilibrium Physics", JNU 2021)
Variable energy flux in turbulence Q&A (talk given in LIFD, University of Leeds)
Turbulence: Arrow of time & equilibrium-noequilibrium behaviour (at ICTS)
Quantification of small-scales and large-scale turbulence in thermal convection (at ICTS)
Rayleigh-Bénard instability and gravity waves, Turbulent buoyancy-driven flow and its phenomenology, Bolgiano-Obukhov and Kolmogorov scaling. Part 1: Video ; Part 2: Video (at ICTS)
On MHD turbulence PPT. (at ICTS)
Challenges in fluid flow simulations using Exa-scale computing (Talk given in the Second Workshop on "Software Challenges to Exascale Computing" (SCEC), Delhi 2018)
Courses with video contents:
Popular web-articles:
Complex Systems: What Makes Them Intractable, Swarajya Magazine, PDF
Importance of Multiscale Description in Science (Part I of the series on multiscale description)
Single-scale and multiscale diffusion (Part II of the series on multiscale description)
Fundamental and Derived Laws in Multiscale Systems (Part III of the series on multiscale description)
My blogs are here.
Selected publications:
M. K. Verma, Turbulent Thermal Convection, Scholarpedia, 14(12):53051 (2019).
M. K. Verma, Variable Energy Flux in Turbulence, J. Phys. A, 55, 013002 (2022). PDF
M. K. Verma, Statistical theory of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence: recent results, Phys. Rep., 401, 229-380 (2004). PDF
M. K. Verma, A. Kumar, and A. Pandey, Phenomenology of buoyancy-driven turbulence: recent results, New J. Phys., 19, 025012 (2017) PDF video-tutorial [Covered in nature Asia Supercomputers overturn 50-year-old conjecture of fluid physics].
M. K. Verma, Asymmetric energy transfers in driven nonequilibrium systems and arrow of time, Eur. Phys. J. B, 90, 190 (2019) PDF [Covered in Deccan Herald Link and in Research Matters Link].
A. G. Chatterjee, M. K. Verma, A. Kumar, R. Samtaney, B. Hadri, and R. Khurram, Scaling of a Fast Fourier Transform and a pseudo-spectral fluid solver up to 196608 cores, J. Parallel Distrib. Comput.,113, 77 (2018). PDF