Born on the New Year's Day of 1952 in the Indian state of West Bengal, Arup Kumar Raychaudhuri completed his BSc from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 1973 and MSc from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1975 before proceeding to Cornell University from where he secured a PhD in 1980, working under the supervision of Robert O. Pohl. His post-doctoral studies were at Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow and on his return to India in 1982, he joined the Indian Institute of Science as a lecturer. He continued at IISc till 1997 during which period, he served as an assistant professor and as an associate professor before becoming a professor in 1997. The same year, he moved to the National Physical Laboratory of India as its director on deputation for a three-year stint and returned to IISc in 2000 to resume his duties as a professor. At IISC, he also chaired the Central Cryogenic Facility from 1993 to 1997 and served as the convener of the Integrated PhD Programme from 1994 to 1997. In 2004, he returned to his home state to join S. N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences as a senior professor and served as its director from 2006 till his superannuation from service. Post retirement, he continues his association with S. N. Bose National Centre by holding the positions of a Distinguished Emeritus Professor and the Nodal Officer of its Technical Research Center project.
Legacy
Raychaudhuri's work have mainly been in the disciplines of material science and condensed matter physics, particularly on the physics of transition metal oxides such as perovskite oxides. Glassy state and High Tc superconductor physics and colossal magnetoresistance have been some of his other interests and his research has helped in the elucidation of the interplay of disorder and interaction. Towards the later part of his career, he worked on nanofabrications using nanolithography techniques. He is also credited with the development of an indigenous low temperature scanning tunneling microscope and a host of other experiment equipment. His studies have been documented by way of a number of articles and the online article repository of the Indian Academy of Sciences has listed 172 of them. Raychaudhuri is known to have contributed to the development of integrated doctoral programs at IISc as the head of the program during 1994–97. He has served as a member of the Commission on Low Temperature Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and 35 doctoral researchers have been mentored by him.
Awards and honors
In 1986, The Indian Physics Association awarded the N. S. Sathyamurthy Award for young scientists to Raychaudhuri. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, one of the highest Indian science awards in 1994. He received the MRSI Medal of the Materials Research Society of India in 1996; the society would honour him again in 2002 with the MRSI-ICSC Super Conductivity and Materials Science Annual Prize. The Indian Science Congress selected him for the Millennium Medal in 2000 and three years later, he received the 2003 FICCI Award in materials science and applied sciences. The Indian National Science Academy honored him with the Homi Jehangir Bhabha Medal in 2008. Raychaudhuri has held several research fellowships which include the Alexander von Humboldt fellowship as well as the J. C. Bose National fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology and was an Associate of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Nuclear Science Centre and National Institute of Advanced Studies. The Indian Academy of Sciences elected him as a fellow in 1993, the same year as he received the honorary senior fellowship of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. The year 2000 brought him two elected fellowships, those of National Academy of Sciences, India and Asia-Pacific Academy of Materials which was followed by the elected fellowship of Indian National Science Academy a year later. He was also selected for the honorary professorship by the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in 2000. The award orations delivered by him include Platinum Jubilee Lecture of Indian Science Congress in 1999.
