FEATURED AUTHOR
Praveen Chaddah
Praveen Chaddah has worked on the quantum solid helium, on the critical state model in superconductor materials for magnet applications, and on first order phase transitions. His research contributions have resulted in over 200 publications. In recent years he has been thinking about ways to enhance the visibility of research done at Indian universities, and of making our research scholars more academically ambitious. In the last few years he has also written on issues related to plagiarism.
Subjects: Physics
Biography
Praveen Chaddah did his schooling in Modern School in New Delhi during 1956-1968, B Sc (Hons.) in 1971 and M Sc in Physics in 1973 from St Stephen’s College at Delhi University. He then joined the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre at Bombay, and did his Ph D in 1978 from University of Bombay. He was a post-doc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during 1978-1980, with another brief stint there in 1982. His research contributions have resulted in over 200 publications. He did research at the Department of Atomic Energy for about forty years from 1973 to 2013. He was the Director of the UGC-DAE Consortium for Scientific Research during 2005-2013.Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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He has worked on electron momentum densities in condensed matter, on the quantum solid helium, on the critical state model in superconductor materials for magnet applications, and on first order phase transitions in vortex matter and in various magnetic materials. To understand published data on half-doped manganites it became necessary to invoke the idea that a first order transition need not present as a sharp transition, and thus latent heat may not be detected. Though this appears counter to what one is taught as an undergraduate, this was recognized as a possibility in disordered materials even forty years back. Pushing this idea required new criteria for experimentally establishing that a material was undergoing a first order transition. One idea implied another, and this continued for over a decade! A new way of looking at first order phase transitions emerged. This book provides a detailed basis for this major shift in the experimental characteristics for identifying first order transitions.
Personal Interests
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Some of the new ideas developed (and brought out in this book) were subsequently used, without proper attribution, by a few other groups. This amounts to plagiarism of ideas which, unlike plagiarism of text, cannot be detected by any of the plagiarism-detection software available. The highly respected Physical Review B obtained corrections in two such cases with the different groups of authors expressing regret, and tendering an apology. Worried about the diminishing emphasis on correcting the more important plagiarism of ideas, Chaddah published a ‘World View’ in Nature [1].
He has also been stressing the need for rapid dissemination of novel ideas and novel results [2]. He holds the view that with the rapid changes on internet, post-publication review may become more commonplace than conventional pre-publication review, leading to drastic changes in the research dissemination procedures.
[1] P. Chaddah, Nature 511 (2014) 127.
[2] P. Chaddah, Proc. Indian National Science Academy 81 (2015) 553-555.
Books
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