Sudip Chakravarty

If anyone had asked me when I was young if I realized that I would become a physicist, I would have had to have emphatically said no. Rather, I had ambitions to become a Cricket Star, a writer, a poet, an artist, but most likely a musician. These are not, however, the professions my family (except my mother) approved of, especially my father who dreamed of me becoming a lawyer, nay a barrister, a graduate from Oxford. He himself became a judge of the Dhaka High Court, and was about to become a judge of the Supreme Court, as the first military coup led by General Ayub Khan in Pakistan took place. We fled to India instantly, never to return to Dhaka. A part of my childhood was wiped out forever. Yes, I did build crystal radio sets and had fun with Chemistry sets, but to become a professor of physics—never in my wildest dreams.

Obviously, life took a turn and I did become a physicist. I would be remiss not to mention many physicists I have met during my twenty plus summers at the Aspen Center for Physics, in particular Elihu Abrahams. I also miss very much my dear friend and collaborator Dick Norton, who passed away. My intellectual development would have been impossible without the help of my brother during my growing years, the Late Sukhamoy Chakravarty, a brilliant economist, and a person of great intellectual integrity. I owe greatly to my mother Bindu Basini Devi, who instilled a sense of love for life, and to my wife Nancy and my daughter Leila.

Research Interest

My research interest involves quantum theory of collective behavior of electronic systems. I am interested in theories of high temperature superconductivity, dissipative quantum systems, quantum phase transition and criticality, localization transition in interacting systems, and the concept of von Neumann entropy in quantum phase transitions. I am currently actively interested in competing electronic states in high temperature superconductors, in particular in understanding the surprising magnetic quantum oscillations discovered recently in these superconductors. Past accomplishments include theories of quantum phase transition in double well and arrays of Josephson junction systems coupled to a dissipative bath, criticality of Ising spin glass through high-order series expansion, path-integral analysis of electronic weak localization in disordered electrons, quantum magnetism and criticality in Heisenberg magnets in relation to high temperature superconductors, electron-electron interaction based mechanism of superconductivity in doped fullerenes, frustrated kinetic energy driven superconductivity in multilayered high temperature superconductors, and the proposal of the hidden d-density wave order as an explanation of the enigmatic pseudogap phase in high temperature superconductors, which I am still vigorously pursuing.

Fellowships and awards

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1982)
Fellow of the American Physical Society (1991)
Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1992)
NSF creativity extension award, 2002-2004

Education

Ph. D. Physics, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 1976
M. Sc. Physics, Delhi University, Delhi, India 1972
B. Sc. Physics, honours, Delhi University, Delhi, India 1970

Employment

Distinguished Professor of Physics, University of California Los Angeles
Professor of Physics, The State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook