Timir Datta is an

Indian-American Indian Americans or Indo-Americans are citizens of the United States with ancestry from India. The United States Census Bureau uses the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Native Americans, who have also historically been referred to ...

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

specializing in high transition temperature

superconductors Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic flux fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. Unlike ...

and a professor of physics in the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of South Carolina, in

Columbia, South Carolina Columbia is the List of capitals in the United States, capital of the U.S. state of South Carolina. With a population of 136,632 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is List of municipalities in South Carolina, the second-largest ...

Early life and education

Datta grew up in India along with elder brother Jyotirmoy Datta a noted journalist; his father B.N. Dutt a scion of two land owning families from Khulna and Jessore in south central Bengal (British India) was an eminent sugar-refining engineer and on his mother's side a relative of

Michael Madhusudan Dutt Michael Madhusudan Dutt ((Bengali: মাইকেল মধুসূদন দত্ত); (25 January 1824 – 29 June 1873) was a Bengali poet and playwright. He is considered one of the pioneers of Bengali literature. Early life Dutt ...

, the famed poet. He received a master's degree in theoretical plasma physics from Boston College in 1974 under the direction of Gabor Kalman.G. Kalman, T. Datta, KI Golden, Approximation schemes for strongly coupled plasmas, Physical Review A 12 (3), 1125 Datta also worked at the Jet Propulsion laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, as a pre-doctoral NASA research associate of Robert Somoano. He also collaborated with Carl H. Brans at Loyola University New Orleans on a gravitational problem of frame dragging and worked with John Perdew on the behavior of charge density waves in

jellium Jellium, also known as the uniform electron gas (UEG) or homogeneous electron gas (HEG), is a quantum mechanical model of interacting electrons in a solid where the positive charges (i.e. atomic nuclei) are assumed to be uniformly distributed in ...

. Datta is of

Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

origin.

Work and research history

Datta was a NSF post-doctoral fellow with Marvin Silver and studied charge propagation in non-crystalline systemsT Datta, M Silver Schottky‐barrier profile in a‐silicon alloys Applied Physics Letters 38 (11), 903-905 at the

University of North Carolina The University of North Carolina is the multi-campus public university system for the state of North Carolina. Overseeing the state's 16 public universities and the NC School of Science and Mathematics, it is commonly referred to as the UNC Sy ...

in Chapel Hill. At UNC-CH he continued his theoretical interests and worked on retarded Vander Waals potentialT Datta, LH Ford, Retarded Van der Waals potential between a conducting plane and a polarizable particle, Physics Letters A 83 (7), 314-316 with L. H. Ford. Since 1982, he has been on the faculty of the University of South Carolina in Columbia. He collaborated with several laboratories involved with the early discoveries of high temperature superconductivity, especially the team at NRL, led by Donald U Gubser and Stuart Wolf. This research group at USC was the also first to observe ZZ Sheng, AM Hermann, A El Ali, C Almasan, J Estrada, T Datta, RJ Matson, Superconductivity at 90 K in the Tl-Ba-Cu-O system, Physical review letters 60 (10), 937-940 (i) bulk Meissner effect in Tl-copper oxides and thus confirm the discovery by Allen Herman's team at the University of Arkansas of high temperature superconductivity in these compounds. He coined the term "triple digit superconductivity", and his group was the first to observe (ii) fractional quantum hall effect in 3-dimensional carbon.T. Datta et al, Observing Quantum Hall States in the Extreme Soft Limit - arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0503166.M Bleiweiss, M Yin, J Amirzadeh, H Preston, T Datta Extreme Soft Limit Observation of Quantum Hall Effect in a 3-d Semiconductor APS Meeting Abstracts 1, 11012 (2004) In a paper with Raphael Tsu he derived the first quantum mechanical wave impedance formula for Schrödinger wave functions.T Datta, R Tsu, Quantum Wave Resistance of Schrodinger Functions arXiv preprint cond-mat/0311479 He was also the first to show that Bragg's law of X-ray scattering from crystals is a direct consequence of Euclidean length invariance of the incident wave vector; in fact Max von Laue's three diffraction equations are not independent but related by length conservation.T Datta, Laue: right or wrong?, Physica Scripta 90(3) 2015 DOI:10.1088/0031-8949/90/3/038002 Datta is an active researcher, with over 100 papers listed in the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) as of 2014.

Patents

Datta was issued one US patent in 1995: "Flux-trapped superconducting magnets and method of manufacture", with two co-inventors.

Anti-gravity work

Datta was involved in the university-funded development of a "Gravity Generator" in 1996 and 1997, with then-fellow university researcher Douglas Torr. According to a leaked document from the Office of Technology Transfer at the University of South Carolina and confirmed to ''Wired'' reporter Charles Platt in 1998, the device would create a "force beam" in any desired direction and the university planned to patent and license this device. Neither information about this university research project nor any "Gravity Generator" device was ever made public. Despite the apparent less than successful outcome of the "Gravity Generator" development effort with Torr, Datta became interested in the effects of electric fields on gravitation, expanding on Torr's theoretical work on the subject.A Gravitational Experiment Involving Inhomogeneous Electric Fields (2002)
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Selected publications

References

External links

Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of South CarolinaTimir Datta's page at the University of South Carolina
{{DEFAULTSORT:Datta, Timir University of South Carolina faculty Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences alumni American people of Indian descent General relativity Gravity Quantum mechanics Superconductivity Anti-gravity Year of birth missing (living people) Living people