Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman

Facts

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman

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Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1930

Born: 7 November 1888, Tiruchirappalli, India

Died: 21 November 1970, Bangalore, India

Affiliation at the time of the award: Calcutta University, Calcutta, India

Prize motivation: "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him."

Prize share: 1/1

Work

When light meets particles that are smaller than the light's wavelength, the light spreads in different directions. This occurs, for example, when light packets - photons - encounter molecules in a gas. In 1928 Venkata Raman discovered that a small portion of the scattered light acquires other wavelengths than that of the original light. This is because some of the incoming photons' energy can be transferred to a molecule, giving it a higher level of energy. Among other things, the phenomenon is used to analyze different types of material.

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MLA style: Sir Venkata Raman – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2021. Sun. 5 Dec 2021. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1930/raman/facts/>

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