Pune physicist Prof Dhar chosen for Boltzmann Medal

Pune: Professor Deepak Dhar, a physicist and emeritus faculty at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, has been selected to receive the prestigious Boltzmann Medal for 2022, a senior official from the premier facility said on Monday.

He is one of the two physicists selected for the award, the second awardee being Prof. John Hopfield from Princeton University.

The Boltzmann Medal, which has been instituted by C3 Commission on Statistical Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), is given out once in three years and honours outstanding achievements in statistical physics. The award will be presented during the Statphys28 Conference to be held in Tokyo, Japan, in August next year.

Dhar has been given the award for his seminal contributions to several areas of statistical physics, including exact solutions of self-organized criticality models, inter-facial growth, universal long-time relaxation in disordered magnetic systems, exact solutions in percolation and cluster counting problems and definition of the spectral dimension of fractals.

An alumnus of the University of Allahabad and IIT Kanpur, Dhar’s tryst with research in statistical physics and stochastic processes goes back a long way beginning with his PhD in 1978 at the California Institute of Technology.

”Over the next four decades, at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai, Prof. Dhar took on several areas of statistical physics to understand the behaviour of self-organised critical systems, explain the dynamics at phase interfaces, and define the spectral dimension of fractals,” a note from IISER, Pune said.

It said Dhar has been at IISER Pune since 2016 and is working on phase transitions and lattice models.

It is great that his achievements have been recognised, said a note quoting IISER Pune Director Prof. Jayant Udgaonkar.

While speaking to PTI, Dhar said, ”It is a great honour to be selected for this award. We, scientists, do not do the research for the sake of getting medals and awards but it is always a good feeling to be recognised.”