Research

Position: Intern (March 2025 - Present)

Mentor: Dr Til Birnstiel, Professor 

I currently work at the Birnstiel Group. My work involves simulating various physical processes in planetary systems and disks using N-body simulations in Python. So far, I have simulated how planets respond to vertical and horizontal perturbations and how these perturbations evolve over time. My ongoing simulation investigates the collapse of a dust cloud, which experiences gas drag, to form a disk. In addition to the research, I attend group seminars and meetings, and I'm writing content for Astrobites, summarising key results from the group's work.

Position: Bachelor Thesis Student (July 2023 - May 2024)

Mentor: Dr Deepak Dhar, Professor Emeritus

I studied introductory statistical mechanics and phase transitions using standard textbooks. In addition, I developed a Python simulation to model the discrete magnetization in ferromagnetic materials. The goal was to simulate the small jumps in magnetization caused by impurities and defects, utilizing the one-dimensional zero-temperature random field Ising model. This simulation allowed us to observe the effects of various parameters on the H vs. M curve. We noted changes in the curve when altering the lattice size (number of spins), modifying the standard deviation of the random field at each site, and experimenting with different distributions to generate the random field, such as uniform, binomial, and exponential.

This project was inspired by Exercise 8.13 in the book "Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity" written by James P. Sethna.

Thesis is available at: Click Here 

Code is available at: Click Here 

Thesis Presentation is available at: Click Here 

Position: Summer Project Student (Jun 2023 - Jul 2023)

Mentor: Mr Ashish Mhaske, Scientific and Technical Officer

I successfully led a team that observed the 21-cm Hydrogen emission from different galactic longitudes of the Milky Way using a conical horn antenna. Based on the Doppler shift in these emissions, the Milky Way rotation curve was obtained. The goal of this experiment was to equip me with the skills required for taking observations from a horn antenna and analysing the captured data. The basics of a radiometer, HI line emission, backend electronics, etc., were covered in the project. I also developed a Python Pipeline to analyse the recorded data to obtain the most red-shifted velocity of the HI cloud.

Report is available at: Click Here 

Code is available at: Click Here 

Position: Project Student (September 2022 - July 2023)

Mentor: Dr Yashwant Gupta, Center Director

I worked on finding off-pulse emissions from the Crab Pulsar using the data of uGMRT. I developed a Python code to perform “folding” and "binning" of a time series data to give the Pulsar profile. Also, wrote a code in C for marking the “on” and “off” gates for finding off-pulse emissions from pulsars. I delved into topics like pulsar folding, dedispersion techniques, pulsar timing and working of the correlator of the Giant Metre-wave Radio Telescope (GMRT). I utilised software like tempo2 and the GMRT Pulsar tool (gptool). Regularly visited GMRT to understand the different aspects in the antenna, back-end electronics and the control room. 

Project Report is available at: Click Here
Code available at: Click Here