Satyendranath Bose medal for the physical sciences is given once in three years to a distinguished scientist, whose scientific work had an impact for a considerable length of time.
Chandan Dasgupta is the Simons Visiting Professor at ICTS-TIFR, Bengaluru. He is a theoretical Physicist, who works on condensed matter physics with emphasis on statistical mechanics. The most important research contributions of Prof. Dasgupta in recent years have been in the areas of the structural glass transition and properties of strongly confined liquids.
To explain the origin of the enormous increase in the viscosity and relaxation times of a liquid near the glass transition, Prof. Dasgupta and collaborators established the existence of growing static and dynamic correlation lengths in realistic glass-forming liquids. These lengths describe the degree of spatial correlations of different quantities in the liquid. They showed that the long-time relaxation near the glass transition is governed by a static correlation length, whereas the short-time relaxation is determined by a different, dynamic correlation length.
Considering water molecules in narrow carbon nanotubes as a prototypical system of strongly confined liquids, Prof. Dasgupta and collaborators showed that strong confinement leads to the occurrence of several unusual effects in the structural, equilibrium and dynamical properties of this system.
Other areas in which he has made significant contributions include structural and mechanical properties of nanoscale objects; equilibrium properties of the mixed phase of anisotropic type-II superconductors; nonequilibrium kinetics and first-passage statistics in surface growth; properties of disordered magnetic systems and theory of phase transitions.
Prof. Dasgupta did doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania, postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Diego and Harvard University, and taught at the University of Minnesota for a few years before joining Indian Institute of Science in 1987. He worked there for 30 years, and he continues to hold the position of Honorary Professor there after retiring in 2017.
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