RECENT RESEARCH WORK: A SYNOPSIS

‘Strongly interacting matter’ has been broadly the area of my research.  I have

mostly been working on properties of hadrons in hot and dense matter, which is of great

relevance for the present as well as upcoming relativistic heavy ion collision experiments, e.g.,

at SIS, GSI, Germany; at AGS, Brookhaven National laboratory, U.S.A., SPS, CERN,

Switzerland, RHIC at Brookhaven National Lab. (U.S.A); at the Large Hadron Collider at

CERN, Switzerland, as well as at the future facility at GSI (Germany).

The medium modifications of hadronic properties have been studied using a chiral SU(3) model

as well as other hadronic models like Walecka model and Quark meson coupling model. Their

effects on experimental observables like dilepton rate and yield and propagation of the

particles, like kaons, D-mesons in the hot and dense matter resulting from heavy ion collision

experiments have been some topics of my research interest. The chiral SU(3) model has been

generalized to include the interactions of the charmed and bottomed mesons and the medium

modifications of the open charm and open bottom mesons have been investigated. The medium

modifications of the masses of the heavy quarkonium states (the charmonium and bottomonium

states) have also been studied as arising from the medium modification of a scalar dilaton field

within the effective hadronic model, which mimicks the gluon condensates of QCD. The

in-medium decay widths of the partial decay widths of the charmonium states to open charm

mesons have also been investigated. This apart, I am also looking at matter at high density in

terms of quark and gluon degrees of freedom. It appears that the strongly interacting matter in

19terms of these degrees of freedom can have a very interesting and rich phase structure at high

baryon densities like various exotic phases of color superconductivity, which could be present in

the interior of neutron stars, arising from the various degrees of freedom (color, flavor,spin)

available for the quarks. These exotic phases can be realised in laboratory- namely for ultracold

atoms. We have suggested such a phase (’breached pairing’) for ultracold atoms.

The medium effects on the heavy bottomonium states as well as their decay widths

have also been studied recently using a field theoretic model for composite hadrons,

which will be of relevance to the experiments to be carried out at the future facility at GSI.

Recently, the heavy flavour mesons have also been studied in the hadronic medium

in the presence of strong magnetic feilds. The effects of magnetic fields on the properties

of hadrons have been inititated in the literature, due to the fact that huge magnetic fields

are created in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collision experiments.