Hi, I’m Santosh. I graduated from Case Western Reserve University with a PhD in theoretical physics. Before this, I was at NIT-Trichy working on my undergraduate bachelor degree, exploring Industrial Engineering. After a short stint in gravitational physics, I worked in a subfield of physics called Condensed Matter Theory (CMT). My research was focused on understanding emergent quantum phenomena in systems where a collection of quantum particles are put together, especially fermions (electrons). In particular, I was interested in the emergent topology in both interacting and non interacting fermions and low energy excitations of them. Another exciting problem I used to work in, involved systems where the approximation of weakly/non-interacting physics breaks down and strong correlations come into play. This leads to extremely weird physics including unconventional Superconductivity, Mott transitions, anyons etc. I use both analytical and numerical tools involving Python/Julia/C/FORTRAN coding to solve equations in Higher Performance Clusters (HPCs).

Apart from the above topics, I’m interested in a lot of domains, particularly in the intersection of mathematics, Physics, Computer Science and music. Among these, of particular interest is stochastic differential equations (SDE) and its applied use in music, sports and quant finance, if you are interested in cricket, do take a look at the recent preprint “Stochastic differential theory of cricket” and “Information flow in political elections: a stochastic perspective”, where I use the ideas from stochastic processes to understand cricket and elections. I also love powerlifting, playing mridangam, taking photographs, Graphic designing and reading.

I also developed and “maintain” these open source packages which were initially started to ease my PhD work flow

  • pySKTB - Scientific Python package for solving Slater Koster tight-binding Hamiltonian
  • pyQuestaal - Python class to interface with QUESTAAL Quantum codes, which is a suite of electronic structure programs.

Things you will find me doing

  • Stuck to black board :crayon:
  • Face down on Mac coding :computer:
  • In couch with TM Krishna running my trusty Noise canceling headphones :headphones:
  • Power lifting :weight_lifting_man:
  • Searching for my next cup of filter coffee :coffee:

I have worked on innumerable problems that you would call humble, but which I enjoyed and felt very good about because I sometimes could partially succeed...No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. - Richard P. Feynman

Recent Blog posts:

Talk - Knitting quantum knots : Topological phase transitions in Two-Dimensional systems

Thank you. A PhD journey with Walter R.L Lambrecht. : Ode to my advisor

Quantum Field Theory 1 : QM from Relativistic field theory