I am a faculty member in the department of Physics at IISc Bangalore. Earlier I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Astronomy department and the Theoretical Astrophysics Center at UC, Berkeley. I completed my graduate studies in the Plasma Physics program, department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University . Before that I was an undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay .

Funaesdalen

Contact information:

I am very happy to talk to graduate (PhD and integrated PhD) students and other researchers working in my areas of interest. If you are interested in visiting our astro group at IISc please contact me at:

Prateek Sharma
Department of Physics
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
India 560012
Phone: 91-80-2293 3375
Email: prateek ! iisc % ac % in (replace ! by at and % by dot)

Please write to me with a short research proposal that combines our research interests if you wish to join the group as a postdoc. IISc has recently started the Raman postdoc fellowship.

Research interests:

Presently I am actively working on all aspects of the circumgalactic medium (CGM), the diffuse medium around Milky-Way like galaxies that contains majority of the halo baryons. Here is a review article accessible to physics undergraduates on multiphase gas in and around the circumgalactic/intracluster medium. We use high-resolution idealized simulations, complementary to the cosmological galaxy formation simulations that generally do not have a high enough resolution to faithfully simulate the multiphase CGM. I have also worked on important astrophysical processes such as accretion, collisionless plasmas, cosmic rays, turbulence, non-thermal emission.
My CV and list of publications
Source code for some of my papers
Our group's YouTube channel (radiative cloud-crushing movies, short summaries of recent papers), Rajsekhar Mohapatra's YouTube channel (ICM turbulence movies)

Summary of selected research projects:

Older work
Thermal instability in the intracluster/circumgalactic medium and its implications
Supernovae and their impact on the interstellar medium
Models of Fermi Bubbles in our Galactic center
Star clusters, winds, radiation and cosmic rays
Large and small scale magnetic fields in non-radiative accretion flows
Astrophysical radio background cannot explain the EDGES 21-cm signal: constraints from cooling of non-thermal electrons
Growth and structure of multiphase gas in the cloud-crushing problem with cooling

Research Group:

PhD students who want to join us are are welcome to talk to me and the students in the group. Since we mostly do numerical simulations (although not always), some numerical experience will be desirable. Due to a large number of emails that I get, I may not be able to respond to all the emails.

Coworkers:

Recent collaborators: Biman Nath ; Andrea Mignone ; Dylan Nelson ; Christoph Federrath
(next position is indicated within brackets)
Postdocs: Naveen Yadav (postdoc at MPA Garching); Kiran Lakhchaura (postdoc at Eotvos-Lorand University)
PhD students: Arpita Roy (postdoc at ANU); Kartick Sarkar (postdoc at Hebrew Univ); Deovrat Prasad ; Prasun Dhang (postdoc at Tsinghua Univ); Prakriti Pal Choudhury (postdoc at Cambridge Univ); Siddhartha Gupta (postdoc at Chicago); Aditi Vijayan (postdoc at IUCAA), Rajsekhar Mohapatra (postdoc at Princeton), Alankar Dutta, Ritali Ghosh, Sourav Bhadra
Undergraduates/Short-term: Ashmeet Singh (PhD at CalTech); Nilanjan Banerjee (PhD at Cornell); Praveer Tiwari (PhD at Washington State); Baban Wagh (outside academia); Upasana Das (postdoc at Colorado Boulder); Kishalay De (PhD at CalTech); Balaji Venkat (PhD at UCSD); Arjun Dey (MS at Weizmann); Rajsekhar Mohapatra (PhD at ANU); Hitesh Das (PhD at MPA Garching); Shashank Dattathri

Teaching:

Graduate course on Numerical Methods in Astrophysics (only accessible within IISc)
Graduate course on Fluids and Plasmas
Graduate course on Radiative Processes in Astrophysics
Graduate course on Computational Physics
Graduate course on Galaxies and Interstellar Medium
Intermediate undergraduate course on Electromagnetism (only accessible within IISc) and Optics
Intermediate course on Fundamentals of Astrophysics

Useful links:

A picture is worth a thousand words.
Astro-ph
Plasma formulary

Personal:

Practical DIY Science for everyone
NOVA online programs
Sal Khan's Academy
Practical Python for Astronomers
Astronomical Productivity
Updated Feb 16th 2022