Department of Physics

Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

We search for dynamical substructures in the LAMOST DR3 very metal-poor (VMP) star catalog. After cross-matching with Gaia DR2, there are ∼3300 VMP stars with available high-quality astrometric information that have halo-like kinematics. We apply a method based on the self-organizing map StarGO to find groups clustered in the 4D space of orbital energy and angular momentum. We identify 57 dynamically tagged groups (DTGs), which we label DTG-1 to DTG-57. Most of them belong to existing massive substructures in the nearby halo, such as the Gaia Sausage or Sequoia. The stream identified by Helmi et al. is recovered, but the two disjointed portions of the substructure appear to have distinct dynamical properties. The very retrograde substructure Rg5 found previously by Myeong et al. is also retrieved. We report six new DTGs with highly retrograde orbits, two with very prograde orbits, and 12 with polar orbits. By mapping other data sets (APOGEE halo stars, and catalogs of r-process-enhanced and carbon-enhanced metal-poor [CEMP] stars) onto the trained neuron map, we can associate stars with detailed chemical abundances with the DTGs and look for associations with chemically peculiar stars. The highly eccentric Gaia Sausage groups contain representatives of both debris from the satellite itself (which is α-poor) and the Splashed Disk, sent up into eccentric halo orbits from the encounter (and which is α-rich). The new prograde substructures also appear to be associated with the Splashed Disk. The DTGs belonging to the Gaia Sausage host two relatively metal-rich r-II stars and six CEMP stars in different subclasses, consistent with the idea that the Gaia Sausage progenitor is a massive dwarf galaxy. Rg5 is dynamically associated with two highly r-process-enhanced stars with [Fe/H] ∼ -3. This finding indicates that its progenitor might be an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy that has experienced r-process enrichment from neutron star mergers. © 2020. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

World University root node

Astrophysical Journal

Dynamical Relics of the Ancient Galactic Halo

We study the spreading of viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, by airborne aerosols, via a first-passage-time problem for Lagrangian tracers that are advected by a turbulent flow: By direct numerical simulations of the three-dimensional (3D) incompressible Navier-Stokes equation, we obtain the time tR at which a tracer, initially at the origin of a sphere of radius R, crosses the surface of the sphere for the first time. We obtain the probability distribution function P(R,tR) and show that it displays two qualitatively different behaviors: (a) for Râ‰LI, P(R,tR) has a power-law tail ∼tR-α, with the exponent α=4 and LI the integral scale of the turbulent flow; (b) for LIâ‰²R, the tail of P(R,tR) decays exponentially. We develop models that allow us to obtain these asymptotic behaviors analytically. We show how to use P(R,tR) to develop social-distancing guidelines for the mitigation of the spreading of airborne aerosols with viruses such as SARS-CoV-2. © 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.

Physical Review Research

First-passage-time problem for tracers in turbulent flows applied to virus spreading

Bulletin of the American Physical Society

States of self-stress in disordered solids

Yielding and transient shear banding in soft jammed solids

We investigate the performance of niobium nitride superconducting coplanar waveguide resonators toward realizing hybrid quantum devices with magnon-photon coupling. We find internal quality factors ∼ 20 000 at 20 mK base temperature, in zero magnetic field. We find that by reducing film thickness below 100 nm, an internal quality factor greater than 1000 can be maintained up to a parallel magnetic field of ∼1 T and a perpendicular magnetic field of ∼100 mT. We further demonstrate strong coupling of microwave photons in these resonators with magnons in chromium trichloride, a van der Waals antiferromagnet, which shows that these cavities serve as a good platform for studying magnon-photon coupling in 2D magnonics based hybrid quantum systems. We demonstrate strong magnon-photon coupling for both optical and acoustic magnon modes of an antiferromagnet. © 2020 Author(s).

Fulltext

Applied Physics Letters

Coplanar cavity for strong coupling between photons and magnons in van der Waals antiferromagnet

We investigate the patterns in distributions of localizable entanglement over a pair of qubits for random multiqubit pure states. We observe that the mean of localizable entanglement increases gradually with increasing the number of qubits of random pure states while the standard deviation of the distribution decreases. The effects on the distributions, when the random pure multiqubit states are subjected to local as well as global noisy channels, are also investigated. Unlike the noiseless scenario, the average value of the localizable entanglement remains almost constant with the increase in the number of parties for a fixed value of noise parameter. We also find that the maximum strength of noise under which entanglement survives can be independent of the localizable entanglement content of the initial random pure states. © 2020 American Physical Society.

Physical Review A

Uniform decoherence effect on localizable entanglement in random multiqubit pure states

Topological quantum error correcting codes have emerged as leading candidates towards the goal of achieving large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers. However, quantifying entanglement in these systems of large size in the presence of noise is a challenging task. In this paper, we provide two different prescriptions to characterize noisy stabilizer states, including the surface and the color codes, in terms of localizable entanglement over a subset of qubits. In one approach, we exploit appropriately constructed entanglement witness operators to estimate a witness-based lower bound of localizable entanglement, which is directly accessible in experiments. In the other recipe, we use graph states that are local unitary equivalent to the stabilizer state to determine a computable measurement-based lower bound of localizable entanglement. If used experimentally, this translates to a lower bound of localizable entanglement obtained from single-qubit measurements in specific bases to be performed on the qubits outside the subsystem of interest. Towards computing these lower bounds, we discuss in detail the methodology of obtaining a local unitary equivalent graph state from a stabilizer state, which includes a new and scalable geometric recipe as well as an algebraic method that applies to general stabilizer states of arbitrary size. Moreover, as a crucial step of the latter recipe, we develop a scalable graph-transformation algorithm that creates a link between two specific nodes in a graph using a sequence of local complementation operations. We develop open-source Python packages for these transformations, and illustrate the methodology by applying it to a noisy topological color code, and study how the witness and measurement-based lower bounds of localizable entanglement varies with the distance between the chosen qubits. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of the Institute of Physics and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.

New Journal of Physics

Scalable characterization of localizable entanglement in noisy topological quantum codes

We report a new site for the \textsl{s}-process in rotating massive metal-poor stars. Above a critical rotation speed, such stars evolve in a quasi-chemically-homogeneous fashion, which gives rise to a prolific \textsl{s}-process. Rotation-induced mixing results in primary production of $^{13}$C, which subsequently makes neutrons via $^{13}\mathrm{C}(\alpha,\mathrm{n})^{16}\mathrm{O}$ during core He burning. Neutron capture can last up to $\sim 10^{13}\,\mathrm{s}$ with the peak central neutron density ranging from $\sim10^7$ to $10^{8}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-3}$. Depending on the rotation speed and the mass loss rate, a strong \textsl{s}-process can occur with production of elements up to Bi for progenitors with initial metallicities of $[Z]\lesssim -1.5$. This result suggests that rapidly-rotating massive metal-poor stars are likely the first site for the main \textsl{s}-process. We find that these stars can potentially explain the early onset of the \textsl{s}-process and some of the carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP-\textsl{s} and CEMP-\textsl{r/s}) stars with strong enrichment attributed to the \textsl{s}-process or a mixture of the \textsl{r}-process and the \textsl{s}-process.

Scanning Electron Microsc Meet

New s-process Site in Rapidly-Rotating Massive Pop II Stars

The discovery of a binary neutron star merger (NSM) through both its gravitational wave and electromagnetic emission has revealed these events to be key sites of r-process nucleosynthesis. Here, we evaluate the prospects of finding the remnants of Galactic NSMs by detecting the gamma-ray decay lines from their radioactive r-process ejecta. We find that 126Sn, which has several lines in the energy range 415-695 keV and resides close to the second r-process peak, is the most promising isotope, because of its half-life t 1/2 = 2.30(14) 105 yr being comparable to the ages of recent NSMs. Using a Monte Carlo procedure, we predict that multiple remnants are detectable as individual sources by next-generation γ-ray telescopes which achieve sub-MeV line sensitivities of ∼10-8-10-6 γ cm-2 s-1. However, given the unknown locations of the remnants, the most promising search strategy is a systematic survey of the Galactic plane and bulge extending to high Galactic latitudes. Individual known supernova remnants which may be misclassified NSM remnants could also be targeted, especially those located outside the Galactic plane. Detection of a moderate sample of Galactic NSM remnants would provide important clues to unresolved issues such as the production of actinides in NSMs, properties of merging NS binaries, and even help distinguish them from rare supernovae as current Galactic r-process sources. We also investigate the diffuse flux from longer-lived nuclei (e.g., 182Hf) that could in principle trace the Galactic spatial distribution of NSMs over longer timescales, but find that the detection of the diffuse flux appears challenging even with next-generation telescopes. © 2019. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

Finding the Remnants of the Milky Way's Last Neutron Star Mergers

Invasion of erythrocytes by merozoites is an essential step for the survival and progression of malaria parasites. To invade red blood cells (RBCs), apicomplexan parasites have to adhere with their apex to the RBC membrane. This necessary apex-membrane contact (or alignment) is not immediately established because the orientation of a free merozoite with respect to the RBC membrane is random when an adhesion contact first occurs. Therefore, it has been suggested that after the initial adhesion, merozoites facilitate their proper alignment by inducing considerable membrane deformations, frequently observed before the invasion process. This proposition is based on a positive correlation between RBC membrane deformation and successful invasion; however, the role of RBC mechanics and its deformation in the alignment process remains elusive. Using a mechanically realistic model of a deformable RBC, we investigate numerically the importance of RBC deformability for merozoite alignment. Adhesion between the parasite and RBC membrane is modeled by an attractive potential that might be inhomogeneous, mimicking possible adhesion gradients at the surface of a parasite. Our results show that RBC membrane deformations are crucial for successful merozoite alignment and require interaction strengths comparable to adhesion forces measured experimentally. Adhesion gradients along the parasite body further improve its alignment. Finally, an increased membrane rigidity is found to result in poor merozoite alignment, which can be a possible reason for a reduction in the invasion susceptibility of RBCs in several blood diseases associated with membrane stiffening. © 2019 Biophysical Society