2024

Happy New Year!

The new year just started, and I am off to this new year with a few thoughts. 

1. Job market and applications
   
   As is quite evident from my posts, for the last few weeks, my brain was pretty much occupied by my applications. To some degree, I am still thinking about the applications and the job market situations, but the frequency and the intensity have decreased by a lot.
   
   As I went on to the job market for this application cycle, I knew that I will have a difficult time finding a position for a several reasons. To name a few, places at which string compactification/pheno activities are vibrant are rare, I have been working on niche topics, and on top of that the topics I worked on mostly (moduli stabilization) to some may seem controversial and many people have strong opinions, maybe too strong one can say, about this topic. Furthermore, I started spending significant time on string field theory. So I thought I would be lucky to be offered even a single job. Despite all those reasons, I was still hoping to have not so difficult time. But, usually bad feelings are right.
   
   When I lost most of my hope, I heard pleasant surprise from University X. I cannot express my gratitude for offering me a postdoc, faculties there were very kind to express genuine interest in the line of work I do despite I do things quite different from what people at University X do. It feels good to be acknowledged by someone. I think I really needed it. I will remember this gratitude for a very long time.
   
   I think the long wait is still there though. But, now with much less stress. I am really hoping that I will get at least one faculty interview request from somewhere.
   
   On the other hand, I think how the offers from best places are made shows what types of and styles of research are appreciated by senior faculties and the community.  I have been looking at the rumor mill somewhat closely to get the grip of which research directions and styles are appreciated. As the deadline for accepting offer can be as late as Feb 15th, making a conclusion at this point is too hasty. But, it still gives me good food for thought.
   
   There are a few things I learned this cycle, of those one thing I want to try is to learn how to come up with simple and solvable toy models that might teach me about some big problems that are too difficult to directly solve.  As I haven't done this type of study, it may take a while for me to really get up to speed , but I think it would be worthwhile to try.  I think it is in general a very good idea to start with a problem I want to solve, and remove all the unnecessary details until I am left with the simple gist of the problem, which will give me a clearer picture. And after all, this is how to make fundamental insights I gather. I should've spent more effort on doing this.

2. I am thinking about what I want to do in the coming year.
   
   A. I think I will continue developing tools to compute various one-loop amplitudes in string orientifold compactifications, eventually with RR fluxes of course. I started out this as I wanted to solidify the supersymmetric AdS vacua with small c.c. me and my collaborators found in https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09064 by showing that these solutions are well controlled. We made some estimates and arguments on why we judged the solutions to be well controlled in the paper, but arguments are fuzzy and cannot be crystal clear. And, since, some experts think that something must go wrong in our solutions in light of some swampland conjectures,  I thought it would be very important to tighten perhaps the only loose ends in our solutions to convince the community: namely, string loop corrections to the Kahler potential and the numerical values of one-loop pfaffian of the non-perturbative superpotential.
   
   I personally think irrespective of the swampland vs landscape debate, this problem is important in its own right although it is not a zero-th order problem. It is kind of a mopping operation that someone has to do. As this problem is too dirty, and it takes long time to make progress, it is not a very attractive problem for many people. So, even though I think this is an important problem,  I think I will have to keep working on this semi-alone until I finally compute things at least at one-loop very explicitly.
   
   I think it is possible to get there, but the problems are
   a. It will probably take a very long time to get to the end point.
   b. Probably, I wouldn't get much recognitions by doing it.  Because of the nature of the problem, and due to the fact that people have strong opinions on KKLT let's say.
   c. And most importantly, I don't like to engage in debates for too long. It wears me out.
   So, probably, building tools to better understand the effective action of string compactification will not be a self-sustainable way to earn bucks to pay bills.
   
   B.  In the past year, I found quite a few recent developments that made me very excited. In random order, I found the following developments very exciting
   
   https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.05303
   https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02490
   https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12592
   https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15111
   https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.14233
   https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.00940
   https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13380
   https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09334
   
   I don't think I will write here why I was so excited by the above mentioned papers, as I could write something wrong at this point. I think I will spend significant time to study the above papers to see if there is anything I can add. I learn things slow, but hopefully I will catch up soon.
   
   C. I think I will keep spending time on string field theory. Working on string field theory may not be the best idea in terms of job prospects, but I think there are some fundamental questions that are left unanswered. I want to know if those problems are solvable in a humane time scale. Until I get the sense of the time scale, I will have to work on some small problems with the intention to approach that goal.
   
   D. I should also probably learn how to properly code and study statistics?  
   
   

3. It really saddens me in a way that quite likely this year will be my last year in Boston and I will have to leave Boston soon. I really love the city, and I think this is the city I like the most in all of the places in the US.  

Jan 1, 2024