On the 2nd and 3rd of March, 2026, a conference on Complex Systems and Condensed Matter Physics was organized by the Department of Physical Sciences of IISER Kolkata. Even though this was supposed to be an internal conference of the institute, the organizers obliged us when we expressed interest to attend it. From APC College, there were six students (Kankana Basu, Rhiddha Acharjee, Rushali Dey, Sayan Bhattacharya, Shagufta Khan and Sourashis Sarkar) and three teachers (Atanu Nandy, Indranil Bhattacharyya along with me) who attended the conference. All the students presented posters.
In this post, I will note down some of the things I found interesting at the conference.
The conference started with a talk by Dibyendu Das (IIT Bombay), one of my favorite teachers during M.Sc. days. He presented his work on Cell Division dynamics. Their work introduced random cell division times which was ignored in earlier theoretical treatments. He talked about two kinds of age-dependent ensembles/distributions – one for a single lineage and the other for the entire population. Possibly, this idea may be carried over to other physics problems.
Then, Sayan Choudhury (HRI) presented an interesting discussion about discrete time crystals. He touched upon ideas such as Floquet Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis, Many Body Localization as a route to obtain a time crystal and Long Range interaction as the route he chose to use for his work. As a tool, he talked about a decorrelator which is related (but different) with another decorrelator I am more acquainted with in connection with spreading of chaos in many-body systems.
Abhik Basu from SINP discussed the KPZ model. The thing I remember from his discussion is the fact that there is no bona fide order parameter for the KPZ transition.
Apratim Chatterji (IISER Pune) applied physics tools to problems in microbiology and emphasized the importance of entropy in the demixing of polymers.
Arnab Das (IACS) talked about prethermalization, an idea not-too-familiar to me but discussed by a few talks and posters at this conference. It is the existence of long lived (quasi)steady state before a system gets thermalized.
In day-1’s last talk, Barun Ghosh from the SN Bose Centre discussed Quantum Geometry using DFT simulations, a topic which I recently heard in a talk at Calcutta University by Umesh Waghmare.
On the second day, Darshan Joshi from TIFR Hyderabad talked abut Quantum Spin Glasses using a bilayer triangular lattice antiferromagnet.
Rejish Nath, IISER Pune, discussed pattern formation in spin-1 systems using numerical solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation.
Subir Das from JNCASR started his discussion from the Mpemba effect and various ways of simulating it. He then went to a discussion of active matter via the Vicsek model. I noted his unusual version of Stokes-Einstein relation with a correlation length being used instead of the particle radius. He also mentioned the term hyperdiffusion which is worth looking up.
Finally, Krishnendu Sengupta, IACS, talked about Floquet spin-1 chains. He highlighted that in the usual spin-1 chains, exact diagonalization techniques would be computationally too expensive but could only be tackled in the Floquet version. Ideas such as perthermalization reappeared in his discussion.
In one of the posters, I came across ideas such as a speed limit in an open quantum system, different from the Planckian speed limits I am more familiar with (from the group of Rangeet Bhattacharyya). There were many more interesting posters covering active matter, superconductors, resistor networks and many more areas.
Overall, this conference was an enriching experience for me after many years and gave me many ideas worth looking up and exploring. Thanks to Bheemalingam Chittari and the other organizers for arranging our participation.