Visit to the Raman Institute



The nearby Raman Institute has a wonderful museum containing all the samples which Raman, a Nobel Laureate, used in his experiments. I learnt of a wonderful mathematical model which naturally predicts a transition from reconstructive to displacive transformations, with the output also giving the trajectories of atomic motions involved in each mechanism.

Lectures given at the IISc

India On the left is a picture of Raman. The picture on the right shows my hosts at the Raman Institute. India
 
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A fossilised part of a tree, presented to Raman, in which the carbon atoms are all replaced by silicon. Mica crystal penetrated along the close-packed directions by (red) iron oxide.
 
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Raman demonstrated that in this Indian string instrument, it is possible to obtain all the harmonics, not just the even ones as in Western string instruments.
 
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The photograph in the middle at the top is of a glass slab which Raman used to study Hertzian contact. The glass surface is perfectly smooth, but each impact with a ball-bearing has caused cracking below the surface, as expected from theory. The strange images below are minerals flourescing in invisible ultra-violent light, in an otherwise pitch-black room (part of Raman's collection) .

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