34th Annual Report (2021-22)

173 Outreach programs (including public lectures/sky watch) arranged by ICARD, etc. Sky Watch Activity was organized by ICARD, GK (DU) Haridwar during 24-25 February, 2022 in collaboration with ARIES, Nainital. Around 1500 students of our campus and nearby schools have participated in this programme to watch sunspots and night sky objects. Dr. Virendra Yadav, ARIES, Nainital has also presented an interesting talk during this event. Few glimpses of this programme are presented below. Awards Dr. Hemwati Nandan (Coordinator, ICARD) was honored with best teacher award by Hon'ble Vice-Chancellor Gurukula Kangri (Deemed to be University) Haridwar on 26 January, 2022. Department of Physics, Cochin University of Science and Technology: Activities from 01 April 2021 till 31 March 2022 Coordinator: Prof. Titus K Mathew Area of Research: Gravity, Cosmology andAstrophysics Talk We have two faculty members, Prof. Titus K Mathew and Dr. Charles Jose, who are leading the research and related ICARD activities in ICARD, Kochi. At present 7 research scholars are working in these area for their Ph.D. We have one on-going project, withDr. Charles Jose funded by DST, Govt. Of India. Talk by Prof. Titus K Mathew on March 10, 2022: “Thanu Padmanabhan and Atoms of space-time” – This talk highlights the contribution of Prof. Padmanabhan on Gravity. The talk was attended by a spectrum of undergraduate, graduate, and research students fromtheUniversity. Talk by Dr. Karthik Rajeev, IIT, Mumbai on April 12, 2022: “Quantum tunneling in real and imaginary time: applications and recent developments”. Quantum tunnelling process can be semi-classically described in terms of trajectories in imaginary time. Although this result is very well known, the precise sense in which the concept of 'imaginary time' appears more rigorously in quantum mechanics is less discussed. In this talk, I will show a simple example in which, starting from a path integral formalism in real time, one can naturally arrive at the 'imaginary time' based picture of tunneling in a rather mathematically rigorousmanner. 1. Jerin Mohan N D and Titus K Mathew, 'On the feasibility of truncated Israel- Stewart model in the context of late acceleration', Class. Quant. Grav. 38 (2021) 14 145016. Publicationsusing ICARDFacilities