Curriculum Vitae SAURYA DAS
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Curriculum Vitae SAURYA DAS Personal details Date of birth: 30 June 1970 Nationalites: Canadian, Indian Languages: English, Bengali, Hindi (fluent), French (fair) Current position Professor of Physics, Department of Physics and Astronomy University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada Contact information Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Lethbridge, 4401 University Drive, Lethbridge, Alberta T1K 3M4, Canada E-mail: [email protected] Telephone: +1-403-329-2689 http://directory.uleth.ca/users/saurya.das http://scholar.ulethbridge.ca/sauryadas http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Saurya Das Other/previous positions • Affiliate Member, Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Canada. • Theme Leader, Quantum Foundations and Quantum Gravity, Quantum Alberta (Universities of Alberta, Calgary and Lethbridge). • 2008 - 2013: Associate Professor of Physics (tenured), University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Became a Full Professor in 2013. • 2003 - 2008: Assistant Professor of Physics, University of Lethbridge, Alberta, CANADA. • 2002 - 2003: Postdoctoral Fellow at University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada. • 2000 - 2002: Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Winnipeg & Winnipeg Institute for Theoretical Physics, Winnipeg, CANADA. • 1998 - 2000: Postdoctoral Fellow at The Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry, The Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A. • 1994 - 1998: Research Fellow at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India. Education and awards • Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India (1999). • First class in M.Sc. (by research) in Theoretical Physics from Anna University, Chennai, India (1994). • First class in B.Sc. (Physics Honours) from Presidency College, University of Calcutta, Kolkata, India (1992) - ranked second in the University. • Awards: Best Ph.D Thesis Award. Honorable Mention in the Gravity Research Foundation Essay Competitions - 2001, 2007, 2014, 2015, 2016. 1 Research interests • Cosmology: Dark energy, dark matter, inflation, resolution of singularities. • Quantum gravity phenomenology: Experimental signatures of quantum gravity, especially in low energy systems. • Quantum gravity theory: Resolution of singularities. • Physics of black holes: Entanglement as a source of black hole entropy, information loss problem. Applications of quantum information science. Brief description of research My research has focussed on aspects of quantum gravity, black hole physics and cosmology. Some of my significnat contributions have been in the following areas: Corrections to black hole entropy: We showed that thermodynamic fluctuations of a black hole gives rise to corrections which always go as the logarithm of horizon area. Thus we were able to explain for the first time why corrections of this nature were obtained earlier, irrespective of the underlying quantum gravity theory being used to compute those corrections (Das, Majumdar, Bhaduri, Class. Quant. Grav. 19 (2002) 2355). Black holes in LHC: We studied corrections to black hole production and decay rates in the LHC due to thermodynamic fluctuations, and the generalized uncertainty principle (GUP). Experiments looking for such black holes in the LHC and other accelerators would need to take these corrections into account (Das, Cavaglia, Maartens, Class. & Quant. Grav. 20 (2003) L205-L212; Das, Cavaglia, Class. & Quant. Grav. 21 (2004) 4511-452). Quantum gravity phenomenology: Despite the immensity of the Planck energy scale, we noted that Planck scale effects can induce corrections to low energy quantum systems and phenomena (such as Lamb shift, Landau levels, scanning tunneling microscope, superconductivity, quantum Hall effect etc.) via the GUP, some of which can be at the threshold of current experimental accuracies. We also showed that the GUP implied that measured lengths, areas and volumes are quantized near the Planck scale. This points towards fundamental discreteness of space at short distances (Das, Vagenas, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101 (2008) 221301; Ali, Das, Vagenas, Phys. Lett. B678 (2009) 497-499). Singularity resolution, dark matter and dark energy: It has always been expected that quantum mechanics would resolve classical spacetime singularities. In a recent paper (Das, Phys. Rev. D89 (2014) 084068) it was shown that this can happen in a simple manner: by replacing clas- sical geodesics with quantal (Bohmian) trajectories in the Raychaudhuri equation (which predicts that all classical geodesics are incomplete and spacetime is singular via the Hawking-Penrose singu- larity theorems), and showing that these quantal trajectories are in fact complete. In other words, the quantal trajectories of fundamental particles in nature will go on forever, and will never en- counter any singularities. Further, this also gives rise to a new quantum potential which translates into a cosmological constant term in the Friedmann equations, which govern the evolution of our Universe. As few reasonable assumptions about the quantum wavefunction, i.e. it is homogeneous and isotropic at large scales, consistent with the cosmological principle) and that it represents a condensate of gravitons or axions with a small mass, consistent with all theories and observations, then correctly reproduces the small observed cosmological constant (dark energy) in nature (Ali, Das, Phys. Lett. B741 (2015) 276). We also calculated the critical temperature of this condensate and argued that this must have formed in the very early universe, and may also account for the observed dark matter (Das, Bhaduri, Class. & Quant. Grav. 32 2015 105003). Entanglement as a source of black hole entropy: We showed that while the ground states of quantum fields traced across a horizon gives the area law, excited states result in power law 2 corrections to this law. We showed that most of the entanglement entropy arose from degrees of freedom closest to the horizon, and that the well-known divergence of this entropy in higher dimensions can be cured by computing the Renyi entropy instead of the von Neumann entropy (Das, Shankaranarayanan, Sur, Phys. Rev. D77 (2008) 064013; Braunstein, Das, Shankaranarayanan, JHEP 1307 (2013) 130). I also worked in Quantum information theory. My collaborators and I showed that the Deutsch algorithm can be efficiently implemented in an adiabatic quantum computer, and that speed-ups of the search problem can be achieved by choosing novel adiabatic Hamiltonians (Das, Kobes, Kunstatter, J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 36 (2003) 1, Phys. Rev. A65 (2002) 062310). Publications Highlights Number of published papers: 82 (72 in peer-reviewed journals and 10 in refereed conference proceedings) Total number of citations: 3140 h-index: 30. i10-index: 57. Research Gate (RG) Score: 36.56 (top 5 percentile) Number of papers cited more than 200 times: 04 Number of papers cited more than 100 times: 05 Number of papers cited more than 50 times: 10 5 papers received Honorable Mention in the Gravity Research Foundation Essay Competition (2001, 2007, 2014, 2015 and 2016). In addition to quantum gravity and cosmology, I also worked on quantum information theory (Ref- ereed publications [20] and [22].) Our proposal to implement Deutsch's algorithm in an adiabatic quantum computer (refereed pub- licationf no.[20]) was carried out in a two NMR based quantum computer (A. Mitra et al, J. Magn. Reson. 177(2) (2005) 285-298, arXiv: quant-ph/0503060). Our approach to test quantum gravity effects in the laboratory was applied to quantum optics and gravity wave detection. These results were published in Nature Physics (I. Pikovski et al, 8 (2012) pp.393-397 [arXiv:1111.1979], and Marin et al, 9 (2013) 71-73). Media Nature Asia: New origin of universe model pours water on Big Bang theory, by Zeeya Merali, January 2015. Ebela (Kolkata, India): January 2015, by Madhumita Dutta. phys.org: No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning, by Lisa Zyga,February 2015. Live Science: Big Bang, Deflated? Universe May Have Had No Beginning, by Tia Ghose, February 2015. Daily Mail, UK: Did the Big Bang ever happen?, by Ellie Zolfagharifard, February 2015. Toronto Star: Canadian scientists take aim at Big BangTheory, by Peter Edwards, February 2015. Scientific American: What 2016 Holds for the Mysterious World of Physics, by Tia Ghose, January 2016. Nautilus: Why Our Universe Doesn't Have a Birthday?, by Susie Nelson, January 2016. The Meliorist (University of Lethbridge student newspaper): Two questions on Life, The Universe and Everything, by Drew Dennis, April 2015. The Endeavour (Lethbridge College student newspaper): Local professor asks big questions, by Sarah Redekop, April 2016. Refereed Publications [74] \Relativistic particle in a box: Klein-Gordon vs Dirac Equations." Pedro Alberto, Saurya Das, Elias C. Vagenas Eur. J. Phys. 35, No.2, 025401 [arXiv:1711.06313]. 3 [73] \Gravitation as a source of decoherence." Saurya Das, Matthew P. G. Robbins, Elias C. Vage- nas Int. J. Mod. Phys. D27, No. 01, 1850008 (2018) [arXiv:1709.07154]. [72] \Planck scale Corrections to the Harmonic Oscillator, Coherent and Squeezed States." Pasquale Bosso, Saurya Das, Robert B. Mann. Phys. Rev. D96, 066008 (2017) [arXiv:1704.08198]. [71] \Reply to "Comment on "Quantum Raychaudhuri Equation". Saurya Das. Phys. Rev. D95, 068502 (2017) [arXiv:1702.05219]. [70] “Amplified transduction of Planck-scale effects using quantum optics." Pasquale Bosso, Saurya Das, Igor Pikovski, Michael R. Vanner. Phys. Rev. A 96, 023849 (2017) [arXiv: 1610.06796] [69] \The