Purvaash P U

Research experience

At IIT Bombay (IITB)

During my stay at IITB, I studied near-field radiative heat transfer (NFRHT) under the supervision of Prof. Karthik Sasihithlu. I explored how, in NFRHT, evanescent waves contribute to radiative heat transfer, resulting in super-Planckian behaviour. It is called super-Planckian as the heat transferred between the two objects exceeds the black body limit. As the distance between the objects decreases, the amount of heat transferred can be \(10^5\) times the black body limit.

Comparing near-field with far-field heat transfer and black body limit

I also studied how the near-field behaviour depends on the optical properties of the material. Later, I studied and reproduced results of Prof. Karthik Sasihithlu’s paper, Coupled harmonic oscillator model to describe surface-mode mediated heat transfer. In the final stages of the project, I tried simulating NFRHT using molecular dynamics under the supervision of Prof. Karthik Sasihithlu and Prof. M. P. Gururajan.


At Weizmann Instiute of Science (WIS)

I worked on particle physics phenomenology under the supervision of Prof. Yosef Nir. In this project, I studied Higgs boson decays in the context of BSM physics. I used data from LHC to constrain BSM model parameters. More about this project can be found in this article, which is my first publication.