Amitava Raychaudhuri

Amitava Raychaudhuri is an Indian theoretical particle physicist. He is the Sir Tarak Nath Palit Professor of Physics at the University of Calcutta and is the nephew of another renowned Indian physicist, Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri.

Amitava Raychaudhuri was born in Calcutta, India and did his schooling at the South Point School (India). He later attended Presidency College, Calcutta from where he obtained his B.Sc degree in Physics in 1970 and then went on to complete his M.Sc at Delhi University in 1973. He obtained his PhD. from the University of Maryland in Particle Physics under the supervision of Oscar W. Greenberg in 1977.

Amitava Raychaudhuri giving a class at the University of Calcutta.

After postdoctoral works at the University of Oxford and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai he joined the University of Calcutta in 1980 as a Lecturer in Physics, where he became Reader and then the Sir Tarak Nath Palit Professor. During his tenure at the University of Calcutta, he was a Scientific Associate (1983–84) at CERN, Senior Indo-US Fulbright Fellow (1988–89) at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Senior Marie Curie Fellow (1994) at the University of Cambridge. He was also a Visiting Professor (1998) at the Oklahoma State University. He was the Director of the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad from 2005 to 2011 after which he has rejoined the University of Calcutta as faculty.

Raychaudhuri worked in diverse areas within particle physics encompassing quantum chromodynamics, grand unified theories, classical solutions, left-right symmetric models, FCNC, supersymmetry, neutrino physics, extra dimensions, etc. He made pioneering contributions in CP-violation in supersymmetric models, the possibility of parity restoration at relatively low energies, neutrino masses and mixing in supersymmetric and other models, long baseline neutrino experiments, besides making a brief but important foray in the foundations of quantum mechanics. He holds a reputation of a charismatic teacher amongst his students.

He was the recipient of the INSA Young Scientist Award in 1982, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, in the physical sciences category in 1997, the J.C. Bose fellowship, the National Merit Certificate and Prize and the National Science Talent Search Scholarship in 1967. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, National Academy of Sciences, Allahabad and the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore. He was also a two-term senior associate of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy. In 2005, Raychaudhuri was conferred the honour of International Alumnus of the Year by the University of Maryland Alumni Association.