Person · physicist & Nobel laureate · India
C. V. Raman
Also known as C.V. Raman, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, CV Raman, Sir CV Raman
Tamil Brahmin physicist (1888–1970) educated at Presidency College Madras, who discovered the Raman effect — the inelastic scattering of light that reveals molecular vibrational modes — in 1928 at Calcutta's IACS and won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics, the first for science in India and the first for a non-white scientist. He headed the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore from 1933 to 1948 as its first Indian director, founded the Raman Research Institute in 1948, and conducted continuous research into optics, acoustics and crystal physics for sixty years. The Raman effect gave spectroscopy a non-destructive tool still central to chemistry and material science.
- Date
- 1888–1970
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; contemporary chronicles and institutional records as applicable.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The discovery was made with a sixteen-rupee commercial spectroscope he carried onto a boat crossing the Mediterranean, where the colour of the sea prompted him to investigate why Rayleigh's explanation (sky-blue scattering) could not account for it. The February 1928 announcement in Nature was preceded by his insistence that an Indian discovery be published from India. The National Science Day of 28 February each year commemorates the discovery.
About the place
Placed at Bangalore (IISc) where he worked for most of his career.
Connections (5)
- DirectedIndian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
C.V. Raman was the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science at Bengaluru from 1933 to 1948. He reshaped the Institute from a workshop-oriented practical training centre into a research university on the German model, built up the Departments of Physics, Chemistry and Astrophysics, and founded the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1934 as a Bangalore-based alternative to the Royal Society of Calcutta. Several of his institutional decisions — the recruitment of G.N. Ramachandran, the appointment of Homi Bhabha as reader, the building of the Raman Research Institute next door after his retirement — defined postwar Indian scientific institutional geography.
- Educated atPresidency College, Calcutta
C.V. Raman received his B.A. and M.A. from Presidency College Madras between 1902 and 1907, graduating at nineteen with the highest marks in physics the Madras University had awarded. His first paper, on diffraction, was written as an undergraduate and published in the Philosophical Magazine of 1906. Presidency College's physics department under Alexander Pedler shaped the questions he carried for the next sixty years, including the one that led to the 1928 scattering discovery at Calcutta.
- Worked atIndian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata
At the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science laboratory on Bowbazar Street, Calcutta, in February 1928, C. V. Raman and K. S. Krishnan isolated the vibrational frequency shift in scattered light that bears his name. The experiment used sunlight, a quartz spectrograph and a liquid cell; it won him the 1930 Nobel Prize, the first in a science awarded to any Indian.
- Worked atIndian Institute of Science, Bengaluru
Raman left Calcutta for Bangalore in 1933 as the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science, where he spent four stormy years in office and the next three decades in research. His disputes with the Tatas and the Government of India over the institute's direction were legendary; so were the diamond, mineral and acoustical studies he carried out there.
- Family ofSubrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Chandrasekhar was Raman's nephew — his father R. Chandrasekhara Iyer was Raman's elder brother. The young Chandra attended Raman's 1928 Bangalore lectures that unveiled the Raman effect; the next year he sailed for Cambridge, where on the voyage out he derived the mass limit that bears his own name. The two Nobels (1930, 1983) are an Indian family story.