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Deepak Dhar ‘first Indian’ to be selected for prestigious Boltzmann Medal

  • Posted By
    10Pointer
  • Categories
    Science & Technology
  • Published
    9th Mar, 2022

Context

Deepak Dhar, a physicist and emeritus faculty at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, has been selected for the prestigious Boltzmann Medal for 2022.

Key-points

  • An alumnus of University of Allahabad and IIT Kanpur, Dhar's tryst with research in statistical physics and stochastic processes goes back a long way beginning with his PhD in 1978 at the California Institute of Technology.
  • Dhar has been at IISER Pune since 2016 and is working on phase transitions and lattice models. 

Reason for the honour

  • Dhar has been given the award for his seminal contributions to several areas of statistical physics, including exact solutions of self-organized criticality models, inter-facial growth, universal long-time relaxation in disordered magnetic systems, exact solutions in percolation and cluster counting problems and definition of the spectral dimension of fractals.

The medal

  • The Boltzmann Medal is instituted by the C3 Commission on Statistical Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).
  • It is given out once in three years and honours outstanding achievements in statistical physics.

Deepak Dhar is one of the two physicists selected for the award. The second awardee is John Hopfield from Princeton University.

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