The "I wanna know " series is started by Kalyan Kundu. The idea behind this series is to examine how certain physical ideas are understood, explained and/ or employed primarily by various branches of physics and in general by science. The realm of physics is expanding like the expanding universe. Previously biochemistry is supposed to be the field of biologists and chemists. It is now well understood that physicists also have a big role to play there. An interesting example is the Monod-Wyman-Changeux model for hemoglobin and allosteric enzymes. By vortices, we mean a topic in hydrodynamics. But, the idea of vortices comes in physics in various ways and disguise. Similarly, the well known concept of tunneling can be naively thought to be a subject of preliminary quantum mechanics. But, in depth analysis of this concept shows how important and well pervading this simple concept is. It is used in nonlinear dynamics, in chemical kinetics, in biology and again in field theory. There are many such topics, like resonance, fluctuation, coherence which have got multi-branch applicability.
The first topic, that was examined in the "I wanna know" series is "Vortices and Flux Lattices". This discussion was held at the institute on the eight day of May, 2002. S. N. Behera gave an introductory talk on "vortices and vortex lattices". S. G. Mishra talked in this context of "wave functions an electron in a magnetic field". A. M. Srivastav gave an introductory talk on "topology of vortices".The title of the talk by S. M. Bhattacharjee was "Phases of vortices". A. Khare gave a talk on "Chern-Simons vortices".
The next topic that was expounded is "Tunneling". Again, it was held at the institute on the twelve day of September, 2002. D. Sahoo gave an interesting as well as educating "overview on tunneling". S. Varma talked of "scanning tunneling microscope" in her talk. L. Satapathy talked of tunneling in nuclear physics in his talk, "Tunneling in nuclear phenomena". V. Shenoi in his talk discussed "electron tunneling in superconductors". A. M. Jayannavar introduced the concept of time in quantum mechanics in his talk, entitled, "Quantum Clocks". Finally P. Agrawal told how the concept of instanton comes in tunneling.
It is important to note that all talks were given by our academic members. Abstract of all talks can be obtained from Kalyan Kundu.
email: kundu@iopb.res.in
Abstract for one day meeting on
resonance
Abstract for one day meeting on
fluctuation
Abstract for one day meeting on
tunneling
Abstract for one day meeting on
vortices and flux lattices