India will Surpass US in Scientific Publications by 2029, Predicts RRI

A study by the Raman Research Institute (RRI) in Bengaluru predicts that India will surpass the US in the number of annual scientific publications by 2029. The study analyzed scientific publications from 50 countries between 1996 and 2020, using statistical tools like entropy and linear regression analysis to forecast future trends.

China will remain the leader in scientific publications, while the US is expected to lose its second rank to Indonesia this year. The study highlights the growing contributions of countries like Indonesia, India, and Iran to global scientific research.

The study uses statistical tools such as entropy (a measure of randomness and therefore, unpredictability, in a data set) and linear regression analysis (relationship between two variables). “Based on the regression analysis, it is estimated that three potential countries such as Indonesia, India and Iran may take the ranks ahead of the US around the years 2024, 2029 and 2041 respectively,” the study says.

The findings of the study have been published in a yet to be peer reviewed paper.

The Indian government and private sector have significantly increased funding for research and development (R&D). Initiatives like the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) provide substantial support. Moreover, Policies like the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 emphasize research and innovation, encouraging a culture of scientific inquiry from an early age.

Adding to this, improvements in higher education, including the establishment of new research institutions and universities, have enhanced the quality and quantity of scientific research.

Besides, Indian researchers are increasingly collaborating with international peers, leading to more co-authored papers and access to global research networks.

India is investing in cutting-edge fields like artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and renewable energy, which are generating a high volume of research output.

Indian Navy and RRI To Jointly Develop Quantum Technologies for Secure Maritime Communications

Department of Science & Technology (DST) Institute to partner Indian Navy in developing secure maritime communications using Quantum Technology

In order to develop secure maritime communications, Quantum technologies will soon be used by Indian Navy, in a joint effort by the Raman Research Institute (RRI), an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), and the Indian Navy, said a public press release by Ministry of Science & Technology.

RRI has inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Indian Navy's R&D unit Weapons and Electronics Systems Engineering Establishment (WESEE), during a ceremony held in New Delhi recently. The MoU, which is for a period of 5 years, was signed between Professor Tarun Souradeep, Director, RRI, and Vice Admiral Sandeep Naithani, Chief of Materiel, Indian Navy.

Under this agreement, RRI’s Quantum Information and Computing (QuIC) lab will lead the research efforts towards developing quantum key distribution techniques that the Indian Navy could leverage in the nation's efforts towards securing free space communications.

The MoU was signed in New Delhi (Image Credit: Indian Navy) 

"I am absolutely delighted that Indian Science and Technology ecosystem has been opening borders in recent years that enable talented and world-class researchers in the academic research institutions to contribute to the growth of Science and Technology capabilities in strategic areas of national importance. Porosity of the perceived boundary between fundamental and applied sciences as well as Science and Technology, will bode well in the coming decades. RRI feels proud to partner with WESEE in cutting edge Science and Technology," said Prof. Souradeep.

Professor Urbasi Sinha, Group Head, QuIC lab, said, “This is a great opportunity to use indigenously developed science and technology knowledge to serve our nation. We are excited with the collaboration and believe that with our expertise in the domain of secure quantum communications, we will be able to help foster cutting-edge research towards identification of potential maritime use-cases for the Indian Navy.”

This lab has been leading the country’s research in the field of secure quantum communication. Some of its major achievements include the development of an end-to-end simulation toolkit named “qkdSim”, ensuring safety in communication platforms, establishing secure communication between two buildings, and, more recently, between a stationary source and a mobile receiver.

QuIC lab also happens to be India’s first laboratory to propose and implement a wide range of applications using single and entangled photons, particularly towards establishing secure communications in strategic areas like banking, defence, and cyber security.

Earlier this month, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIITH) partnered with Synergy Quantum India (SQ India) to establish Quantum Solution Lab with an aim of developing financially feasible quantum technologies and their applications in both military and civilian use cases.

In December 2020, India's DRDO unveiled "Quantum Key Distribution (QKD)" as a new technology developed by DRDO's Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) and DRDO Young Scientist Laboratory (DYSL-CT).

Last year in August, it was reported that, QNu Labs, a Bengaluru-based Deep Tech Start-up, supported by the Defence Ministry's iDEX, did successful trials of QKD system and even equipping Indian Army with Quantum Communication technology.

Indian Astronomers Uncover Mystery Behind Decline of Star Formation Rate after its Peak 8-10 Bn Yrs Ago

Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) located at a site about 80 km north of Pune

For long, scientists have been intrigued by the decrease in the rate at which stars were formed in galaxies after it peaked about 8-10 billion years ago. They have now deciphered the mystery behind this decline in star formation activity by measuring the atomic hydrogen of the galaxies.

Galaxies are made up mostly of gas and stars. Gas converts to stars with time. Understanding this conversion requires measurement of the atomic hydrogen gas, the primary fuel for star formation in galaxies in early times. Astronomers have long known that galaxies formed stars at a higher rate when the universe was young than they do today. But the cause of this decline is unknown, mostly because there was no information about the amount of atomic hydrogen gas at that time.

A team of astronomers from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR), Pune, and the Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bangalore, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India has used the upgraded Giant Metre wave Radio Telescope (GMRT), operated by NCRA-TIFR, to measure the atomic hydrogen content of galaxies seen as they were 8 billion years ago. 

The research carried out by Aditya Chowdhury, Nissim Kanekar, and Jayaram Chengalur of NCRA-TIFR, and Shiv Sethi, and K. S. Dwarakanath of RRI and published in the journal Nature records the earliest epoch in the universe for which atomic gas content of galaxies has been measured. 

A GMRT antenna at night. Picture by Rakesh Rao

The custom code used to calibrate the GMRT data is publicly available at https://github.com/chowdhuryaditya/calR.

The research was funded by the Department of Atomic Energy, India, and DST, India.

“Given the intense star formation in these early galaxies, their atomic gas would be consumed by star formation in just one or two billion years. And, if the galaxies could not acquire more gas, their star formation activity would decline, and finally cease”, said Aditya Chowdhury, a Ph.D. student at NCRA-TIFR and the lead author of the study. “The observed decline in star formation activity can thus be explained by the exhaustion of the atomic hydrogen,” he added.

The measurement of the atomic hydrogen mass of distant galaxies was done by using the upgraded GMRT to search for a spectral line in atomic hydrogen. K. S. Dwarakanath of RRI, a co-author of the study, mentioned, “We had used the GMRT in 2016, before its upgrade, to carry out a similar study. However, the narrow bandwidth before the GMRT upgrade meant that we could cover only around 850 galaxies in our analysis, and hence were not sensitive enough to detect the signal.”

“The big jump in our sensitivity is due to the upgrade of the GMRT in 2017”, said Jayaram Chengalur, of NCRA-TIFR, a co-author of the paper. “The new wideband receivers and electronics allowed us to use 10 times more galaxies in the stacking analysis, giving sufficient sensitivity to detect the weak average 21 cm signal.”

Detecting the 21 cm signal from the most distant galaxies in the universe was the main science goal of the GMRT when it was designed and built by a team led by Govind Swarup in the 1980s and 1990s. “Govind Swarup was very interested in this work and was following it keenly. Sadly, he passed away shortly before it was published. This work would not have been possible without him and the wonderful team that he put together to first build and then upgrade the GMRT”, said Nissim Kanekar of NCRA- TIFR, a Swarna Jayanti Fellow of DST and co-author of the study.

Technical explanation of GMRT upgradation

Unlike stars, which emit light strongly at optical wavelengths, the atomic hydrogen signal lies in the radio wavelengths, at a wavelength of 21 cm, and can only be detected with radio telescopes. Unfortunately, this 21 cm signal is very weak and difficult to detect from distant individual galaxies even with powerful telescopes like the upgraded GMRT. To overcome this limitation, the team used a technique called “stacking” to combine the 21 cm signals of nearly 8,000 galaxies that had earlier been identified with optical telescopes. This method measures the average gas content of these galaxies.

An image of the stacked 21 cm signal detected with the upgraded GMRT, arising from atomic hydrogen gas in galaxies 22 billion light-years away.

The spectrum of the stacked 21 cm signal detected with the upgraded GMRT, arising from atomic hydrogen gas in galaxies 22 billion light-years away. The width of the signal gives an indication of the average rotation of galaxies 8 billion years ago.

Indian Scientists Find A New Way that can Make Crucial Quantum Operations Simpler

Scientists experimenting with new ways to manipulate quantum states so that they can be harnessed for computing, communication, and metrology, has found a novel way to characterise and estimate such states. This method of characterisation called Quantum State Interferography, can help make such manipulations simpler so that several crucial operations in quantum technologies become less cumbersome.

Scientists from Raman Research Institute, an autonomous institute under the Department of Science & Technology, Govt. of India, have found a new way of inferring the state of a system (both two-dimensional qubits, the simplest quantum system as well as higher-dimensional “qubits”) from an interference pattern, which they term ‘Quantum State Interferography’. This work, partially supported by the QuEST network programme of the DST, has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The determination of an unknown quantum state is usually done by a method known as Quantum State Tomography (QST). This involves measuring projection of the quantum state on various directions in state space and reconstructing the quantum state from the information obtained. However, in particular, scenarios where the dimensions are large, the operations needed to perform tomography increase quadratically. The experimental settings often need to be changed many times, thus making the process very cumbersome.

The RRI team showed that without changing any settings in the experimental setup, it is possible to infer the unknown quantum state of a higher dimensional system. The setup requires only two interferometers from which many interferograms can be obtained to reconstruct the state.  This provides a ‘black box’ approach to quantum state estimation -- between the incidence of the photon and extraction of state information, conditions within the set-up are not changed, thus providing a true single-shot estimation of the quantum state.

A qubit is a 2-dimensional quantum system and requires usually 2 complex numbers to be determined towards state estimation. However, various constraints and physical assumptions leave only two real numbers, finally to be determined. Instead of finding these two real numbers from various projections, in this work, they were determined from the intensity and phase shift of the interference pattern. Also, when many such quantum states are incoherently mixed, the amount of mixedness can be determined from the visibility of the interference pattern. This can be used to characterize the state of a two-particle system, which in turn can be used to quantify entanglement, also in a single-shot method. This idea can be further extended to find parameters describing higher-dimensional quantum states from a set of interference patterns.

This work gives a single-shot black-box approach to quantum state estimation as well as quantifying quantum entanglement.  Manipulation of quantum states is the most crucial operation in any quantum technology protocol, be it quantum computing, quantum communication, or quantum metrology. Similarly, quantum entanglement is a ubiquitous resource in quantum technology.

The new technique forquantum state estimation developed and experimentally demonstrated by Urbasi Sinha and her group members at the Quantum Information and Computing Lab at RRI is a handy and effective tool in comparison to conventional techniques with a tremendous scaling gain involving the use of interferometry. Theoretical support for this development was provided by a collaborator from HRI. Moreover, the work also indicates how this technique could lead to miniaturised devices in the long run, which could be used for quantum state estimation at a commercial scale.

Publication link: https://journals.aps.org/prl/accepted/3607bY09D3214e77d23f4a87330320d171b04ebfb

For more details, Professor Urbasi Sinha (usinha@rri.res.in) can be contacted.]