e-mail addresses: rajan@lanl.gov
Curriculum Vitae and Professional Highlights
Physics Research Interests:
The main thrust of my research is in elucidating the strongly interacting sector of the Standard Model of elementary particle interactions (interactions of quarks and gluons and the phenomenology of mesons and baryons made up of these elementary particles) using lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (Lattice QCD). The interesting quantities we have calculated include the hadron spectrum, quark masses, chiral properties of hadrons, glueballs, decay constants, semi-leptonic form factors, form factors for rare radiative decays of B mesons, and matrix elements of 4-fermion operators and their B parameters. To understand the QCD vacuum we have also investigated chiral symmetry breaking and topology on the lattice.
Our large scale simulations over the period 1988-2000 were done under the auspices of the DoE Grand Challenges awards. Over this period simulations were carried out on Crays and a number of parallel supercomputers including the Thinking Machines CM-2 and CM-5, the SGI Origin 2000 at the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos, the Cray T3E at NERSC and commodity clusters. At Los Alamos, I have also contributed to the development of high performance parallel computing.
In addition to lattice QCD, I have worked on determining the critical exponents of Statistical Mechanics systems, in particular the Ising and XY models. My favorite methods are Monte Carlo Renormalization Group and finite size scaling.
A recent colloquium on High Energy Physics: Discovering elementary particles and determining their masses (5.6 MB pdf file LA-UR-03-6215).
HIV/AIDS, Public Health and Education in the Developing World:
Since January 1999 I have been involved in developing educational material for accelerating the spread of awareness on disease prevention (in particular for HIV/AIDS), health care, education, and enviornmental among school students, industrial workers, villagers, and the public in general. Summary of my work in India can be found at AIDS Crisis in India. Based on my experiences and work in India and New Mexico, I have written a number of articles that are archived at MY WORK. In particular, a detailed analysis of the underlying reasons for the spread of HIV/AIDS in India, its consequences for development and security, and mitigation strategies is presented in the monograph Risky Sex, Addictions, and Communicable Diseases in India: Implications for Health, Development, and Security.
In a recent colloquium at Stanford and NREL, I make the connection between HIV/AIDS and the future of the poor, illiterate and marginalized populations and argue, using India as an example, why business as usual will not suffice, and why we need to help the poor in developing countries make the transition to the knowledge society (4.7 MB pdf file LA-UR-05-3139). Another talk at the University of Chicago discuses HIV, Empowerment, and how concerned people can help. (LAUR-07-3557)
Stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS is not just a matter of awareness, or of access to retroviral drugs, or of working health care systems, or of education, or of removing violence to women, or of GLT rights, or of providing job skills and jobs, or of good governance or of poverty. It is about all these issues and much more. Increasingly I believe that development requires and needs a holistic approach at all levels. To this end, a framework for a coupled systems analysis is presented in Five Global Grand Challenges. A related talk The Dynamics of change: India a case study analyzes the fast pace of change taking place globally and highlights four areas of priority that urgently need investment for accelerating the process of providing opportunities to the poor.
Energy Security:
Energy is key to development. The twentieth century was dominated by fossil fuels -- oil, coal and gas. Today we are faced with declining production of conventional oil in many parts of the world and natural gas may follow soon. The USA (and many other parts of the world) is increasingly dependent on unstable areas for its oil and natural gas supplies. Equally important, the environmental impact of burning fossil fuels has become global and there is emerging concensus regarding the urgency to address global warming. Current cumulative investment in fossil fuels already exceeds $15 trillion. Furthermore, China, India and the USA have hundreds of new coal fired power plants in planning and construction stages that will not be CO2 neutral and will continue to be in operation for most of this century. Such a large system will take a long time to change even under the best of circumstances. It is, therefore, important to plan, develop and transition to carbon neutral fuels of the future (second half of the twenty first century) quickly. Recent colloquia on this topic include
International Security in the New Millennium
Motivated by my interest in public health and rural development and witnessing the very poor state of health care in the developing world, the emerging pandemics, marginalization of over two billion people, and environmental concerns, I have initiated a forum at Los Alamos to discuss these and traditional security issues. The charter and activities of this forum can be found at (LANL internal access only)
Los Alamos Strategic Studies Program
Travel Plans: