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The Life and Work of E. C. George Sudarshan


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1 INSA Distinguished Professor, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bengaluru - 560 080, India
 

E. C. G. Sudarshan is widely regarded as the most gifted theoretical physicist of Indian origin in the latter half of the 20th century. This article describes his early student years in India, and at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, before he left for USA in 1955 to work with R. E. Marshak at the University of Rochester. It then recounts his career as it evolved thereafter, and his decision to settle there. His contributions in many areas of physics, in each of which he made a distinct mark, are recalled. In particular, his work on the V-A theory of the weak interactions, and on the Diagonal Representation in quantum optics, are described in some depth and detail. Sudarshan maintained strong links with the Indian physics and scientific communities all his life. From the 1970s onwards, he was at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and then at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Madras, till 1990. The events of this period are recounted. Some remarks on his personality, and his views on life and philosophy, conclude the article.

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  • Lee, T. D. and Yang, C. N., Question of parity conservation in weak interactions. Phys. Rev., 1956, 104, 254.

  • Wu, C. S., Ambler, E., Hayward, R. W., Hoppes, D. D. and Hudson, R. P., Phys. Rev., 1957, 105, 1413.

  • At just about the same time as the experiment by Wu et al.2, the conceptually simpler experiment using the decay

  • Λ → p + π– was done by Garwin, Lederman and Weinrich at Columbia University, and independently by Telegdi and Friedman at the University of Chicago, USA. The result of the former appeared in the same issue of the Physical Review2, while publication of the latter in the same journal seems to have been delayed because of a ‘Columbia effect’.

  • Fermi, E., La Ricerca Scientifica, 1933, 4(2), 491; Attempt at a theory of β-rays, Il Nuovo Cimento, 1934, 11, 1; Z. Phys., 1934, 88, 161.

  • Gamow, G. and Teller, E., Selection rules for the β-disintegration. Phys. Rev., 1936, 49, 895.

  • Johnson, K. and Sudarshan, E. C. G., Inconsistency of the local field theory of charged spin 3/2 particles. Ann. Phys., 1961, 13, 126.

  • A detailed account of what happened may be found in Indira Chowdhury, Growing the Tree of Science – Homi Bhabha and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Oxford University Press, 2016.

  • Sudarshan, E. C. G. and Mukunda, N., Classical Dynamics – A Modern Perspective, Wiley, NY, USA, 1974; reprinted by Hindustan Book Agency, Delhi, 2015.

  • Currie, D. G., Jordan, T. F. and Sudarshan, E. C. G., Relativistic invariance and Hamiltonian theories of interacting particles. Rev. Mod. Phys., 1963, 35, 350.

  • Klauder, J. R. and Sudarshan, E. C. G., Fundamentals of Quantum Optics, W. A. Benjamin, New York, USA, 1968.

  • Marshak, R. E., Okubo, S. and Sudarshan, E. C. G., Consequences of charge independence for the magnetic moments and masses of Σ hyperons. Phys. Rev., 1957, 106, 599.

  • Misra, B. and Sudarshan, E. C. G., The Zeno’s paradox in quantum theory. J. Math. Phys., 1977, 18, 756.

  • Sudarshan, E. C. G., Mathews, P. M. and Rau, J., Stochastic dynamics of quantum-mechanical systems. Phys. Rev., 1961, 121, 920.

  • Chruscinski, D. and Pascazio, S., A brief history of the GKLS equation. Open Syst. Inf. Dyn., 2017, 24(3), 1740001.

  • It took ten years, from 1919 to 1929, to establish that the electron energy spectrum was continuous. In the early 1920s, it seemed apparent that it was continuous except for some gamma-ray lines. Soon the continuity was clearly established by the work of C. D. Ellis and collaborators in England. But the outstanding experimentalist Lise Meitner (1878–1968) believed firmly in the spectrum being discrete, and did experiments to prove her claim. Ellis and co-workers did further experiments to support the continuous spectrum claim, but Meitner kept coming back with more data and arguments. Finally Ellis and Wooster did a calorimetric measurement which conclusively established the continuity of the spectrum; but Meitner would not agree until she had repeated the experiment herself. By now it was 1929.

  • Fermi, E., Quantum theory of radiation. Rev. Mod. Phys., 1932, 4, 87.

  • Yukawa, H., On the interaction of elementary particles I. Proc. Phys. Math. Soc. Jpn., 1935, 17, 48.

  • The μ meson was initially mistaken for that predicted by the Yukawa theory. It was only in a 1943 paper by S. Sakata and T. Inoue, published in 1946, that it was suggested that π mesons are made by cosmic rays, followed by the sequence of decay processes π− → μ− + ν−μ and μ− → e− +ν−e + νμ. All these varieties of neutrinos were not known then, but they did suggest that νμ is a spin 1/2 neutral particle like νe but possibly different.

  • Klein, O., Nature, 1948, 161, 897; Tiomno, J. and Wheeler, J. A., Rev. Mod. Phys., 1949, 21, 153; Lee, T. D., Rosenbluth, M. N. and Yang, C. N., Phys. Rev., 1949, 75, 905.

  • Dallaporta, N., On the mean lives of heavy unstable particles. Il Nuovo Cimento, 1955, 1, 962.

  • Dalitz, R. H., Decay of τ-mesons of known charge. Phys. Rev., 1954, 94, 1046.

  • Sudarshan, E. C. G. and Marshak, R. E., The Nature of the FourFermion Interaction. In Proceedings of the Conference on Mesons and Newly Discovered Particles, September 1957 (ed. Zanichelli, N.), Bologna, Padua-Venice, 1958. Reprinted in The Development of Weak Interaction Theory (ed. Kabir, P. K.), Gordon and Breach, 1963.

  • Feynman, R. P. and Gell-Mann, M., Theory of the Fermi Interaction. Phys. Rev., 1958, 109, 193.

  • Sudarshan, E. C. G. and Marshak, R. E., Chirality Invariance and the Universal Fermi Interaction. Phys. Rev., 1958, 109, 1860.

  • This is reprinted in the 2006 volume edited by Ranjit Nair mentioned in the section ‘Events and publications from 2006’.

  • Born, M. and Wolf, E., Principles of Optics, Pergamon Press, Oxford, England, 1959, 1st edn.

  • Hanbury Brown, R. and Twiss, R. Q., Nature, 1956, 177, 27.

  • Mandel, L., Proc. Phys. Soc., 1958, 72, 1037.

  • Gabor, D., J. Inst. Elec. Eng. (London), 1946, 93, 429.

  • Klauder, J. R., Ann. Phys. (NY), 1960, 11, 123.

  • Bargmann, V., Commun. Pure Appl. Math., 1961, 14, 187; Segal, I. E., Illinois J. Math., 1962, 6, 500; S. S. Schweber, J. Math. Phys., 1962, 3, 831.

  • Mehta, C. L. and Sudarshan, E. C. G., Phys. Rev., 1965, 138, B274.

  • Probably the most extreme case of this kind in physics is that of Arnold Sommerfeld (1868–1951). Between 1917 and 1951, he was nominated 84 times for the Nobel Prize, practically every year, but was never chosen. Among those who nominated him were Max Planck, Max von Laue, Wilhelm Wien, Robert Millikan, James Franck, and Enrico Fermi, all Nobelists. However, neither Albert Einstein nor Niels Bohr did so. Interestingly, none of his own ‘Nobel’ students – Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Hans Bethe and Pieter Debye – ever nominated him.

  • George Sudarshan. In Science and the Spiritual Quest: New Essays by Leading Scientists (ed. Mark Richardson, W.), Routledge, 2002.


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  • The Life and Work of E. C. George Sudarshan

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Authors

N. Mukunda
INSA Distinguished Professor, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bengaluru - 560 080, India

Abstract


E. C. G. Sudarshan is widely regarded as the most gifted theoretical physicist of Indian origin in the latter half of the 20th century. This article describes his early student years in India, and at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, before he left for USA in 1955 to work with R. E. Marshak at the University of Rochester. It then recounts his career as it evolved thereafter, and his decision to settle there. His contributions in many areas of physics, in each of which he made a distinct mark, are recalled. In particular, his work on the V-A theory of the weak interactions, and on the Diagonal Representation in quantum optics, are described in some depth and detail. Sudarshan maintained strong links with the Indian physics and scientific communities all his life. From the 1970s onwards, he was at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and then at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Madras, till 1990. The events of this period are recounted. Some remarks on his personality, and his views on life and philosophy, conclude the article.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.18520/cs%2Fv116%2Fi2%2F179-192