S. Pancharatnam

S. Pancharatnam ( Shivaramakrishnan Pancharatnam; born February 9, 1934 in Calcutta, † May 28, 1969 in Oxford) was an Indian physicist. He is known for the early introduction of a variant of the geometric phase in 1956 in experiments with polarized light.

Life

Pancharatnam studied at the Nagpur University and then went to the Raman Research Institute CV Raman in Bangalore. Although Raman was a brother of his mother and a brother of Pancharatnam already studied in Raman, but just for those reasons did not actually Pancharatnam study with him. It was not until a conversation with Raman, who knew nothing about the relationship at the time, led to a sense of change. In Raman he dealt in particular with crystal optics, which led to several publications. In 1961 he went as a reader to the newly founded University of Mysore, where Sivaramakrishna Chandrasekhar, with whom he was also related, held the chair of physics. In 1960 he visited the United States and Canada, including a Conference on Coherence and Quantum Optics, Rochester. He also visited the second Rochester Conference in 1966 and 1968, a conference on optical pumping in Warsaw, where he gave the lecture Theory and experimental observation of modulated birefringence. 1964 until his death, he was a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford ( St. Catherine 's College and Clarendon Laboratory) at George William Series, where he worked on, among others, with experiments on optical pumping. He died at age 35 from a lung disease from which he had suffered in India.

Pancharatnams precursor role in the introduction of the geometric phase was not known until after Michael Berry's general treatment in 1983. Sometimes the Berry phase (geometric phase) is therefore also named additionally after Pancharatnam. Pancharatnam 1956 examined the interference of rays of polarized light passed through several crystals. For this purpose he had a definition of the phase of polarized light insert, which is now named after him.

In 1958 he became a member of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

1975 published his collected works. Not included is his contribution to the article on crystal optics in the Handbook of Physics 1961, edited by GN Ramachandran and S. Ramaseshan (his brother ). Pancharatnam declined to be named as co -author.

Writings

• S. Pancharatnam: Collected Works. Oxford University Press, 1975 ( Foreword by GW Series). Review: R. W. Ditchburn: Collected Works of S. Pancharatnam. In: Optica Acta: International Journal of Optics. 23, No. 1, 1976, pp. 84-84, doi: 10.1080/716099374.