Who is chandrasekhara venkata raman

In Raman, through studying the spectroscopic behaviour of crystals, approached in a new manner fundamental problems of crystal dynamics. His laboratory has been dealing with the structure and properties of diamond, the structure and optical behaviour of numerous iridescent substances labradorite, pearly felspar, agate, opal, and pearls. Among his other interests have been the optics of colloids, electrical and magnetic anisotropy, and the physiology of human vision. Raman has been honoured with a large number of honorary doctorates and memberships of scientific societies.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society early in his career , and was knighted in It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. In , he published his work on the "Molecular Diffraction of Light," the first of a series of investigations with his collaborators which ultimately led to his discovery of the radiation effect which bears his name. He discovered that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the light that is deflected changes in wavelength.

This phenomenon is now called Raman scattering and is the result of the Raman effect. Join Our Email List. By Anna Demming. Talented and ambitious from the first, for Indian physicist C. Raman, winning the Nobel prize for physics was not so much a distant aspiration as a career plan.

He was the first person of colour and the first Asian to receive the award, following the discovery of a light scattering effect that has since become a key characterisation tool in materials science. His father was a teacher at the local high school, later moving his family to Andhra Pradesh, where he took on a position in the faculty of physics at Mrs A. Narasimha Rao College. He graduated with a BA from the Presidency College at the University of Madras in aged 16, winning gold medals in both physics and English.

Despite the limited possibilities of society, Raman started to work here in his spare time. In his first prominent work, he expanded the definition of the fundamental vibration modes—previously proposed by Hermann von Helmholtz—into more complex modes. Raman accepted this proposal in , which would mean leaving the lucrative civil service and face serious losses in salary.

Raman made his first trip abroad to England in by participating in a scientific conference attended by representatives from universities in the British Empire. While returning to India by sea, the intense blue color of the Mediterranean attracted his attention.

Physicist Lord Rayleigh explained this event as the reflection of the blue color in the sky over the sea as a result of the elastic scattering of the sunlight Rayleigh scattering in the atmosphere. However, observing the sea surface with a light-polarizing device called the Nicol prism in a degree angle Brewster angle proved that this explanation was insufficient.

After the experiments conducted in Calcutta, C. Raman concluded that the blue color of the water comes from the light emitted by the water molecules, just as the blue color of the sky originating from the scattering of the sunlight emitted by the air molecules. In addition to the primary Rayleigh scattering components that have the same frequency as the incident light, Raman also saw that there is a weaker secondary component with a variable frequency i.

Initially, Raman scattering was thought to be due to fluorescence, but Raman eliminated this possibility by showing that the scattered light was highly polarized, with the experiments conducted with K. Raman realized that the second beam he observed in early was the optical analogue of the X-ray—the Compton scattering discovered by Arthur Compton in , scattering X-rays passing through the substance and forming a longer wavelength.