Early Days of the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar

Avinash Khare, Physics Department, Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pune, India 411007

A detailed account of the early days of the Institute has been given by Prof. Pradhan in the special issue brought out by the institute on the occasion of the institute completing twenty five years in 1999. Hence to avoid the duplication, this account will primarily focus on the academic progress during this period and will be much shorter.

Even though the institute officially came into existence in 1972 as an autonomous research institute under the government of Odisha, it really took of on Sept. 4, 1974 when Prof. Trilochan Pradhan, then Professor and head, Theoretical Nuclear Physics Division joined as founder director. Soon, Mr. Nityananda Raut joined the institute on deputation from Utkal University as grade-I assistant. After couple of months, the institute moved to a rented building in (A-105) Saheed Nagar. The interviews for faculty selection in Theoretical Physics took place in January 1975 and faculty positions at various levels (Professor, Associate Professor and Lecturer) were offered to sixteen people, broadly equally in the areas of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics. Two of them A. Khare and J. Maharana joined the institute as faculty on January 30, 1975. The academic activity soon took off and the first three preprints from the institute came out by early March and the first paper from the institute was published in Physical Review Letters in June and the second one in September of the same year. By the end of June, another six faculty members (SP Misra, SN Behera, DN Tripathy, SR Shenoy, A. Ansari, CR Praharaj) had joined the institute while by the end of 1975 another four faculty members (L. Satpathy, BK Rao, SG Mishra and LK Chavda) had joined so that within a year the institute had twelve faculty members.

It is remarkable that Odisha state government thought about starting a research institute in physics. The genesis of this goes back to more than 150 year old Revenshaw College, Cuttack which had good physics 1department with excellent teachers who inspired students many of whom turned out to be physicist of high caliber who occupied important positions in research institutes and universities in India and abroad. This was noticed by top physicists in the country and some of them including Prof. D.S. Kothari suggested to then Education Minister of Orissa Mr. Banamali Patnaik to create facilities for research in physics in the state. Mr. Patnaik was a remarkable person with vision and had carried out several administrative reforms in higher education of the state. Mr. Patnaik took the suggestion of Prof. Kothari and others seriously and that’s how the Institute of Physics was established as an autonomous institute by the government of Odisha. It is to the credit of the politicians and bureaucrats of Odisha that all of them enthusiastically supported the institute with liberal funding for ten years and there was no political interference in either the appointment of the faculty or day to day functioning of the institute. Looking at the history of independent India, starting and then nurturing of the Institute of Physics by the Odisha govt. is a rare event. It is doubtful if such a thing will be ever repeated again in the country.

The institute faculty decided right in the beginning that a one year Pre-doctoral course should be started right away from the month of August 1975 and those who successfully pass this course be awarded Pre-doctoral diploma in Advanced Physics and would be eligible to carry out Ph.D. work under the supervision of the institute faculty members. The course was inaugurated in August 1975 by Dr. Raja Ramanna, Director BARC, Mumbai. A house was rented nearby in Saheed Nagar to be used as hostel for the students. About 8 students joined for the one year course. Simultaneously the research work too had picked up momentum and research papers started appearing regularly in internationally reputed journals. Institute Colloquim and group seminars started on a regular basis. The atmosphere during that early period was amazing which is hard to describe in words. Most of the faculty members were young with lot of energy and there was dream of building a good research institute.

One nontrivial issue was the procurement of back volumes and current issues of standard journals as well as books. Luckily Prof. Pradhan got addresses of the back volume suppliers in USA and by 1977 the institute had back volumes of almost all the standard journals at very reasonable prize. With the funding available from the Orissa government, it was possible to order most of the standard current journals. Several books were purchased from the Indian sources and by the end of 1977, the institute had 2a reasonably good library.

Another generous support from the government of Orissa was in the form of donating 50 acres of land for the establishment of the permanent campus of the Institute. Further they also gave generous support for the construction. Prof. Pradhan wisely decided to erect compound wall which gave identity to the institute and saved it from the encroachment of the institute land. The main building and the hostel were completed by August 1981 and the institute moved to its new campus after the inauguration of the campus by the then Prime Minister Smt. Indira Gandhi.

In 1976, the institute hosted, in collaboration with the physics department of the Utkal University the annual High Energy Physics Symposium which is sponsored by the Department of Atomic Energy. Further, in 1978 as well as in 1982 the institute organized a symposium entitled ”Current Trends in Physics” where several leading physicists were invited to give talks summarizing the latest development in their field. Sometimes around 1977 it was felt that the institute was incomplete without experimental research work. Hence a modest experimental research program was initiated with the recruitment of two exper- imental physicists, i.e. H.C. Padhi and P. Sen who set up positron annihilation and Compton profile experiments in order to carry out condensed matter studies.

Sometime in 1979 or so Dr. H.S. Sethna Chairman Atomic Energy visited the institute during which the institute sought financial assistance from dept. of atomic energy (DAE). A committee led by Dr. K.T. Thomas visited the institute and recommended grant-in-aid of Rs. 5 lakh per year in addition to liberal grant from Dept. of Science and Technology (DST) for some major research projects. It also recommended that aided status like that of TIFR and SINP can be considered later after the review of the work of the institute by another committee. After few years, another committee headed by Prof. B.M. Udgaonkar visited the institute and recommended that the institute be granted aided status of DAE like TIFR and SINP and in April 1985 the institute became a member of the DAE family.

As a follow up of the recommendation of the Thomas committee, the institute, after lot of deliberations decided to apply for a low energy accelerator for research in condensed matter, atomic applied and low energy nuclear physics. In particular, the institute opted for 3-MV tandom pelletron. After several rounds of discussions with funding agencies, finally the project was approved and after DAE takeover, it was 3funded by DAE.

The Institute will complete 45 years in Sept. this year but it still remains a small institute. May be as Schumacher says ”Small is Beautiful”. But big is not necessarily ugly.

Short Write up on the Scientific Works of Prof. Pradhan

If one looks at the research papers of Prof. Pradhan, they stand out not only for the quality of research, relevance of his research in the present context but also for his broad interests. He has done excellent work not only in quantum field theory and high energy physics, but also in the areas of atomic collisions, plasma physics and electron gas. This one can perhaps attribute to his mastery over fundamentals, his broad based interest and high quality of graduate courses that he took at University of Chicago from famous scientists like Enrico Fermi. His commitment to research is amazing. In Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata where he was a faculty for 12 years, he would be at his desk by eight thirty in the morning and would be carrying out his research till about five in the evening.

His first paper in 1957 based on his Ph.D. thesis was a single author paper on atomic collisions. In this paper he essentially introduced the impulse approximation in atomic collisions and this paper has received wide attention and has also been mentioned in the books on atomic collisions. His second paper (also a single author paper) was about Landau damping in plasma oscillations in a uniform magnetic field and it came in the same year which has also received wide attention and been mentioned in books. In 1959 he wrote his first paper (again a single author paper) in the area of quantum field theory while in 1960 he had a paper about dielectric constant of a dense electron gas with a collaborator. His first four papers were not only of high quality but also in four entirely different fields which is very unusual. He continued to write papers on plasma physics and electron gas till 1970 while he had his last paper on atomic collisions as late as in 1994.

After 1970, Prof. Pradhan’s papers are primarily in the areas of quantum field theory and high energy physics. If one looks at these papers it is clear that Prof. Pradhan never followed the current fashion but always worked on his own ideas. Further, most of his ideas were rather novel and unconventional. By 1965 it had been proved that a massless particle with spin one or greater than one cannot have electric charge. In 1965, in a paper in Nuovo Cimento, he tried to extend that proof to spin half particles. Another of his novel work was 1975 paper in Physical Review D where he and his collaborator showed that a la Regge poles, there are also poles of the scattering amplitude in the complex scale dimension plane. They wrote several papers trying to look for such poles in potential scattering as well as in quantum electrodynamics and also tried to relate it to scaling violation. He wrote one of the earliest paper about what is popularly known as Schwinger term. in 1998 he presented models for composite quarks, leptons as well as photon. In recent years the idea of 1fundamental length has received lot of attention. Prof. Pradhan thought about it several years before.

One of his work with profound insight is about magneto-electric effect. Unfor- tunately, he was ahead of his time. One might recall that in recent years multifer- roics and magneto-electric materials has received wide attention both theoretically and experimentally. Prof. Pradhan got interested in magneto-electric materials in early eighties. In one paper he with his collaborator showed that the vacuum of the 2+1 dimensional quantum electrodynamics with Chern-Simons term shows magneto- electric effect. In 2006 in a paper in Physica Scripta he looked at the Raman spectra of magneto-electric crystals.

Prof. Pradhan was naturally attracted to symmetries and has made subtle use of them in several of his papers. For example, the idea of para supersymmetry greatly attracted him and discussions with him has motivated others in the institute to write paper about it. Another aspect of his work which stands out is nonperturbative nature of his studies. For example, he along with his collaborator calculated electron self mass to all order in fine structure constant α but to first order in Planck’s constant. Other ideas which attracted him were local duality and scale and conformal symmetries. But one idea which he followed over more than two decades is that of magnetic monopoles. Particular mention may be made of his work where he suggested the possible existence of magnetic charge in Stark states of hydrogen atom. He wrote several papers about it in the last 25 years, the latest one being as late as in 2017 when he was 88 year old. In fact in 2017 he wrote three papers, the other two being about the resolution of EPR paradox through long range force between spins and the other about the existence Lagrange points in the circular orbits of hydrogen using Bohr’s theory. I might add here that he has written several papers about long range force between spins.

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