A summer school was organised for undergraduate students at the Bidalur campus of the PPISR during the period 1 June - 15 July 2008. As this was the first activity of its kind being organised by PPISR, only a small number of students, roughly 10, were chosen to participate. Those who participated came from Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore. There were two participants who were working in the IT-industry but were keenly interested in Basic Science. Based on this experience , a more streamlined and well advertised school shall be held in the coming years.
An unusual format was adopted for this school consisting of structured lectures mostly in physics about Light: Classical and Quantum, lectures on Number theory in mathematics emphasising the deep connections between number theory and the main theme of the school, projects to be undertaken by the students, and innovative but inexpensive experiments to be carried out by the students. In addition to these, eminent scientists in and around Bangalore came to deliver lectures and interact with the students on frontier areas of their research.
There were in depth lectures on Geometrical Optics, Polarisation, Pancharatnam Phase, Variational methods in Optics, Wave Optics, Quantum Mechanics, Number Theory, Geometric Phases in Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Information & Quantum Computing.
In addition to all the faculty members of PPISR, there were 3 guest faculty; Professor Anirban Pathak from Noida lectured on Quantum Information, Prof K. Sreenivasan from Dayanandsagar Institutions lectured on Fibre Optics and Professor Vikram Vyas from St. Stephen's College, Delhi lectured on Computational Methods using Visual Python.
Several distinguished scientists from Bangalore gave lectures and interacted with students. They were Professors Roddam Narasimha(IISc & JNCASR), Anil Kumar(IISc), C.S. Sukre(Nehru Planetarium), N. Kumar(RRI), Apoorva Patel(IISc) and B. Anantanarayan(IISc).
The students also visited various labs in Raman Research Institute, visited the Planetarium and were taken to the Vainu Bappu Observatory in Kavalur.
The students carried out research projects in areas like Negative Refractive Index Materials, Quantum Cryptography, Classical and Quantum Error Correcting, Adiabatic Theorems in Classical and Quantum Mechanics, Adiabatic Quantum Computing and Advanced Mathematics like Fibre Bundles and Differential Geometry.
They also performed simple but innovative experiments.
The detailed schedule for the school is available here.
Please note that PISR plans to hold such summer schools every year. Any student interested in participating in our summer schools as well as other activities is encouraged to apply to us by writing to: