Paras Koundal

Hi there 👋🏾 I am a Physicist working in the field of Cosmic-Ray Physics at IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica.

I was born in the small town of Nagrota Bagwan in the district Kangra in the beautiful Indian state of Himachal Pradesh . The town lies in the serene lap of the Dhauladhar Mountain Range.

I studied at Green Field Sr. Sec. School, Nagrota Bagwan till tenth standard. This rigorous academic structure of the school helped put a strong foundation for my future. Later, I took admission in the GAV Public School, Kangra to complete my upper secondary education. After that I secured admission at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Mohali, India; a leading research institute in India in the field of basic sciences; to complete my bachelor's and master's education.

The course structure of IISER, Mohali is five-year long. In the first two years, I attended lectures in all basic sciences ranging from subjects like Pure Mathematics to Philosophy of Science. Other courses in subjects like biology, literature, coding, astronomy and specifically physics introduced me to the variety of research going on in each of these areas and also laid a strong academic foundation.

In the third year I had to chose a major for my master's degree which I happily chose as Physics. The next three years involved more courses in specific areas of physics; ranging from Classical Mechanics to Quantum Field Theory. The variety of other courses was very similar to the courses you can find in any other international university. In the final year, I did my master thesis on the "Estimation of Accelerator Neutrino Flux", under the supervision of Dr. Satyajit Jena who is a leading researcher in the field of Experimental High Energy Particle and Nuclear Physics.

Ongoing Work in Ph.D.

Currently, I am a Ph.D. Researcher in the Institute for Astroparticle Physics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. My work involves the analysis of Cosmic-ray energy and mass spectrum using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. It is an exciting work where currently I am using Graph Neural Networks to find new parameters which can possibly help in composition analysis and also improve the previous analysis substantially. Focus on improving the overall analysis pipeline is also a major motivation.

Few of my other Research Experiences

May-August, 2018

I was a summer student selected in the J-PARC Summer Student Program, at the world famous KEK (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization), Japan which hosts the famous Belle Experiment. My project was to use the Plastic-scintillator (and MPPC) to measure cosmic muon rate and use the Argon-based scintillator detector to characterize slow and fast decay components of an alpha source. At the end of the program, I presented a talk about the work done during the project.

May-August, 2017

Under the supervision of Dr. Sanjib Agarwalla , I studied the field of Neutrino Physics and did qualitative analysis of experiments; conducted and ongoing experiments; in the area of Neutrino physics.