Sadhan Kumar Adhikari is a Brazilian-Indian professor of

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

, since 1991, at the Institute of Theoretical Physics (IFT) of the

São Paulo State University São Paulo State University (UNESP, pt, Universidade Estadual Paulista "Júlio de Mesquita Filho") is a public university run by the state government of São Paulo, Brazil. UNESP has a combined student body of over 45,000 spread among its 23 c ...

(UNESP).

Early life

Sadhan Kumar Adhikari was born to Nalini Ranjan and Mira Adhikari on 2 January 1948 in Kharagpore, India. In 1962 he graduated from

Hindu School, Kolkata Hindu School is a state government-administered school in Kolkata (Calcutta), India. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest modern educational institution in Asia (then known as ''Hindu College''). The institution played a key role during Bengal R ...

and then joined the

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

program at the

Presidency University, Kolkata Presidency University, Kolkata (formerly known as Presidency College, Kolkata) is a second major public state aided research university located in College Street, Kolkata. Considered as one of best colleges when Presidency College was affili ...

which he finished with honours by 1965. The same year he started the

Master of Science A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast to ...

course at the

University of Calcutta The University of Calcutta (informally known as Calcutta University; CU) is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate State university (India), state university in India, located in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Considered ...

which he completed by 1968. For a year he was a post-M.Sc fellow at the

Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics The Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) is an institution of basic research and training in physical and biophysical sciences located in Bidhannagar, Kolkata, India. The institute is named after the famous Indian physicist Meghnad Saha. ...

, India and in 1973 obtained PhD in

from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

, USA. From 1973 to 1976 worked at the

University of New South Wales The University of New South Wales (UNSW), also known as UNSW Sydney, is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the founding members of Group of Eight, a coalition of Australian research-intensive ...

, Australia as a post-doc scholar and since 1976 till 1991 was an associate professor at the

Federal University of Pernambuco Federal University of Pernambuco ( pt, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, UFPE) is a public university in Recife, Brazil, established in 1946. UFPE has 70 undergraduate courses and 175 postgraduate courses. , UFPE had 35,000 students and 2,000 ...

, Brazil.

Research

He contributed to the area of few-body scattering in nuclear and atomic physics, renormalization in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, and the physics of cold atoms and superfluids. He formulated the quantum scattering theory in two dimensions using

Lippmann–Schwinger equation The Lippmann–Schwinger equation (named after Bernard Lippmann and Julian Schwinger) is one of the most used equations to describe particle collisions – or, more precisely, scattering – in quantum mechanics. It may be used in scatt ...

s and the asymptotic

wave function A wave function in quantum physics is a mathematical description of the quantum state of an isolated quantum system. The wave function is a complex-valued probability amplitude, and the probabilities for the possible results of measurements mad ...

for scattering. From 2002 to 2009 he used

Gross–Pitaevskii equation The Gross–Pitaevskii equation (GPE, named after Eugene P. Gross and Lev Petrovich Pitaevskii) describes the ground state of a quantum system of identical bosons using the Hartree–Fock approximation and the pseudopotential interaction model. A ...

to study the formation of bright

soliton In mathematics and physics, a soliton or solitary wave is a self-reinforcing wave packet that maintains its shape while it propagates at a constant velocity. Solitons are caused by a cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium ...

s in a Bose–Einstein condensate using FORTRAN 77 programs. He, in collaboration with P. Muruganandam and Antun Balaž, and colleagues from the Institute of Physics, Scientific Computing Laboratory, Belgrade wrote popular Fortran and C programs to solve the Gross–Pitaevskii equation and study properties of Bose–Einstein condensates using the

Crank–Nicolson method In numerical analysis, the Crank–Nicolson method is a finite difference method used for numerically solving the heat equation and similar partial differential equations. It is a second-order method in time. It is implicit in time, can be wri ...

. He is the author of two books on scattering theory published by Academic Press, San Francisco, Hard cover (1988), Paperback (2012) and eTextbook (2012) and by John Wiley & Sons, New York (1998). According to Webofscience he published more than 300 research articles with more than 6000 citations (H factor=39).

Awards

Dr. Adhikari is a Graduate fellow of the

(1970), and a Fellow of the

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Olga and Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died on April 26, 1922. The organization awards Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been ...

(1996).

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Adhikari, Sadhan Kumar 1948 births Living people Academic staff of the Federal University of Pernambuco Academic staff of the University of New South Wales United States National Science Foundation officials University of Pennsylvania fellows Academic staff of the São Paulo State University Brazilian people of Indian descent