INDIAN PHYSICS ASSOCIATION AWARDS.

The presentation of R. D. Birla Memorial Award- 2006

R. D. Birla Memorial Award- 2006

R.D. Birla Memorial Award given for the excellence in pure physics and carries a citation, gold medal and cash of Rs.50,000/-. The award for 2006 was awarded jointly to Prof. N.Kumar , Homi Bhabha Distinguished Professor at Raman Research Institute, Bangalore & Dr.S.S.Kapoor , DAE Homi Bhabha Chair.at BARC, Mumbai. Professor S. Bhattacharya, Director, TIFR presented the award to Prof N. Kumar.

The citation of R. D. Birla Award 2006 for Excellence in Physics to Dr.N.Kumar is given below

CITATION

Prof. N. Kumar, former Director of the Raman Research Institute, has made wide-ranging and substantive contributions in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics, especially in the area of classical and quantum transport in disordered systems, phase transition, and superconductivity.

His PhD thesis was on theoretical studies of static and dynamical interactions in magnetic solids. He resolved the anomalies of transient specific heat experiments by treating the crucial energy exchange between the fast and the slow degrees of freedom via coupled Boltzmann – Diffusion equation. Along with his student, he published a seminal paper on quantum transport in dynamically disordered conductors. He provided an exact solution of electron transport in dynamically disordered lattices and showed that the parameterised solutions neglect the effect of electron acting back on the lattice and effectively ignore the dissipation concomitant with fluctuations. This exact solution was a subject of intense experimental verification, which confirmed the importance of his work.

He made very significant contributions in quantum resistance fluctuations in disordered metals. He was among the first scientists to treat probabilistically the non-self averaging nature of resistance near the mobility edge. He adapted the powerful invariant imbedding approach to treat these resistance fluctuations exactly for a one-channel system and later generalized it to arbitrary dimensions. Later he and his collaborators developed a novel approach based on maximum entropy principle to treat the N-channel case.

In his work on normal state transport in high- Tc superconductors, he proposed a subtle mechanism in which electrical transport along the c -axis of high- Tc layered oxides was visualised as a coherent inter-planar tunnelling between neighbouring layers blocked by repeated intra-planar incoherent scatterings. The model based on this provided new insights and is consistent with experimental results on single crystals.

His other important works include coherent multiple scattering of light in a highly scattering medium, boson localization in an amplifying random medium, exact results in metallic adhesion, two-boson mechanism of superconductivity, weak-localization, and magnetic pairing in high-temperature superconductors.

He co-authored a monograph on Interaction in Magnetically Ordered Solids with K.P.Sinha, and a book Invitation to Contemporary Physics with Ho-Kim Quang and C.S.Lam.

It is in recognition of this outstanding work of his, that the Indian Physics Association is honouring him with the R. D. Birla Award 2006.


The presentation of M.M. Chugani Memorial Award -2004

M.M. Chugani Memorial Award –2004

M. M. Chugani Memorial Award of the Indian Physics Association for the year 2004 was awarded to Dr. V.C.Sahni of Director, Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology & Director, Physics Group of BARC. The Chugani award for excellence in applied physics and carries a citation, gold medal and cash of Rs.one lakh.

Prof.Ashok Misra, President National Academy of sciences, India presented the award to Dr. V.C.Sahni on 24 May 2007 at TIFR, Mumbai.

The citation of Shri Murli M Chugani Award –2004 to Dr. V.C.Sahni is given below

CITATION

Dr. Vinod Chandra Sahni has made outstanding and sustained contributions to several research and development programmes of national importance in the Department of Atomic Energy. He is an accomplished theoretical solid-state physicist. Early in his career, he co-authored an excellent treatise on Lattice Dynamics. He, along with his colleagues, built the first indigenous laser Raman spectrometer in the country. He and his team also built facilities for Compton profile measurements, Auger Spectroscopy and Energy Dispersive X-ray Diffraction to pursue research in frontier areas. He led a team that studied superconducting materials, especially peak effect, and as a result, a US patent for a superconducting switch was obtained.

He initiated and nurtured programmes to build many state of the art analytical systems. These included the country's first Inductively Coupled Plasma Source Mass Spectrometer with extremely high sensitivity; multi collector thermal ionization mass spectrometers as well as the only facility in the country to evaluate superconducting wires for their current carrying capacity. He led a group involved in making several radiation detectors for various technological applications and ultrahigh vacuum instruments for use on the synchrotron radiation sources. He also designed H 2S gas sensors for DAE's Heavy Water Plants; and Pt/Pd catalyst bearing cards for safe recombination of hydrogen. Several of these technologies were transferred to the Indian industry.

Dr. Sahni was instrumental in commissioning of the Indus-2, the Indian Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) for research in experimental physics in 2005. During the process of setting up Indus-2, the country's biggest particle accelerator, Dr. Sahni ensured that most of the involved technologies were developed indigenously. He organized the entire task of assembling and commissioning of synchrotron radiation source, Indus-2, with great foresight and planning.

He also steered the Indian participation in the construction of world's biggest particle accelerator, Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at CERN, Geneva. His keen physical insight, exceptional ability to handle diverse problems and outstanding scientific leadership has contributed to the progress of many scientific and technological programmes.

Dr. Sahni is presently Director, Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, (RRCAT) Indore and also Director, Physics Group, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai.

For his outstanding contributions to basic sciences as well as to the development of new technologies and their applications, the Indian Physics Association confers the Murli M. Chugani Award 2004 to Dr. Vinod Chandra Sahni.

The presentation of Buti Foundation Award- 2006

Buti Foundation Award- 2006

Buti Foundation Award of the Indian Physics Association for the year 2006 to Dr. Tarun Souradeep of IUCAA, Pune. The Buti Foundation Award is given for outstanding contributions in the area of Theoretical Applied Physics, Astrophysics and Biophysics by a young Indian scientist and carries a citation, a gold medal and a cash of Rs. 25,000

Prof. Govind Swarup, FRS, Former Professor of Eminence, TIFR and former Director GMRT, National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, Pune presented the Awards to Dr. Tarun Souradeep of IUCAA, Pune on 24 May 2007 at TIFR, Mumbai.

The citation of Buti Foundation Award 2006 For Excellence in Physics to Dr. Tarun Souradeep is given below

CITATION

Dr. Tarun Souradeep obtained a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, and then returned to his first love of physics and cosmology. He obtained a PhD in astrophysics from the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) while working with Prof. Varun Sahni. He then took up a post-doctoral associateship at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and research associateship at Physics Department, Kansas State University,.

Tarun Souradeep is a cosmologist at IUCAA. He is a leader in the field of cosmic microwave background radiation. His work on discerning the shape and size or topology of our Universe using the tiny fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background radiation that he accomplished along with Richard Bond and Dmitry Pogosyan of Canada is among the finest in the field of observational cosmology. He has also carried out important investigations into the statistical properties of the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation. His work in this area, which he did with his students in IUCAA, is considered aesthetically beautiful in its mathematical structure. It has also found wide applications in state-of-the-art contemporary cosmological observations. He has also worked on the intricacies of analysis of cosmic microwave background radiation data, such as the effects of non-circular beam and incomplete sky coverage. He has been at the forefront of extracting various cosmological parameters from cosmic microwave background radiation data including those from the newly released WMAP 3-year data. A direct application of his work has been a better assessment of the primordial power spectrum from inflation using cosmic microwave background radiation data.

For his many achievements in astrophysics, he has been presented several awards such as the 'Scopus Young Scientist Award for Physics', the very prestigious 'Swarnajayanti Fellowship' in 2006, the ' N.S. Satyamurthy Award' and the 'Ravi Kumar Bhalla Award'.

The Indian Physics Association has great pleasure in awarding him the First Buti Foundation Award for Young Physicist.