Ramanath Cowsik
Washington University in St. Louis
|
Primary Section: 13, Physics Secondary Section: 12, Astronomy Membership Type:
International Member
(elected 2004)
|
Biosketch
Ramanath Cowsik was born in India, graduated with B.Sc. (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, English, and Sanskrit) in 1958 from Mysore University, M.Sc. (Physics) in 1960 from Karnataka University and Ph. D (Physics) in 1968 from Bombay University. After a year’s training at the DAE –Training School, he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Cowsik has served briefly (3 years) on the faculty at Berkley, at Max Plank Institute fur Extraterrestrische Physik (1year), as the Director Indian Institute of Astrophysics (10 years), retired from Tata Institute as a Distinguished Professor, and joined the Faculty of Washington University in St. Louis at the end of 2002 and served as the Director of McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences (12 years) and currently continues to serve as James S. McDonnell Professor of Space Sciences, in the Physics Department. In a research career that started in 1961 he has made contributions to Astrophysics and to Astro-particle Physics, which explores and exploits the interconnections between astronomy and cosmology on one hand and particle physics on the other. In 1972 he showed that weekly interacting fermion and boson relicts from the hot early epochs of the big bang universe will populate the universe in large numbers today, and even with a very small mass, they will constitute the dark matter that is responsible for the formation and gravitational dynamics of galaxies. He exemplified this idea with an explicit calculation showing that neutrinos of mass of few eV will trigger initial condensations that led to the formation of clusters of galaxies. He was responsible for the establishment of the Indian Astrophysical Observatory with a 2m optical/ infrared telescope and a Cerenkov telescope for high energy gamma rays at an altitude of ~ 15000 feet in Hanle, Ladakh, India. In astrophysics his primary focus has been on high-energy phenomena related to cosmic rays, X-ray, γ-ray and radio astronomies. In astroparticle physics, he calculated cosmic-ray induced neutrino fluxes and described underground experiments to detect them, set stringent bounds on violations of Lorentz invariance, on neutrino masses and their radiative decays and on baryon number violating processes like proton decay and neutron-antineutron oscillations.
Research Interests
He has continued research interests in astrophysics and astro-particle physics. His primary focus is on building a sensitive torsion balance to study the possible existence of long-range interaction of dark matter to baryons and leptons in apparent violation of Einstein’s Equivalence Principle.
