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In October 2025, Dr. Varghese BABU joined the Belle Group at IPNS as a researcher.

We interviewed him about what sparked his interest in the world of particle physics, the research he has conducted, and how he refreshes his mind when faced with challenges in his work.

During high school, a couple of years prior to the first operation of the LHC, I read newspaper and magazine articles on the Higgs and the LHC and was captivated by the descriptions of the collider and the so-called “God particle” it sought to discover. At the time, unaware that Indian institutions were collaborating in the experiment, I regarded it as fantastical work happening in distant lands, utterly unreachable and disconnected from my very ordinary existence in the unremarkable corner of the world I belonged to. It was only upon joining TIFR, Mumbai, for my graduate studies several years later that the opportunity to work in particle physics presented itself. I took it and never looked back.

I have been involved in the Belle / Belle II experiment since my graduate studies. For my Ph.D. thesis, I worked on CP violation in the charm physics sector with Belle data and was also part of the team that assembled  Layer 4 of the Belle II Silicon Vertex Detector. Later I worked on the Belle II pixel detector during my first postdoctoral fellowship at DESY in Hamburg. During my second postdoctoral fellowship at IPHC, Strasbourg, I worked on time-dependent CP violation in radiative B meson decays using a combined Belle and Belle II dataset.

It is entirely due to fortuitous circumstances, given the stochastic nature of available research opportunities, that I was able to zigzag—quite happily—between analysis and detector work thus far in my career.

I am currently a joint KEK–University of Louisville postdoc, and my main mandate is to contribute to the operations and local support of the KLM detector, as well as to work on aspects of its detector control software. I also hope to start working in the near future on an analysis searching for lepton-flavor violation in charm meson decays.

Old hobbies and pastimes have faded away over the years, and sometimes new ones emerge due to changing circumstances and having been away from home for so long. These days, I occasionally solve the online cryptic crosswords from The Hindu, an old and a venerable Indian newspaper. I am also happy that KEK has a badminton court, and I hope to slowly restart playing after a few years’ break due to injury.

We look forward to your future activities at the IPNS!