Ashoke Sen

For the Indian politician, see Ashoke Kumar Sen.

Ashoke Sen অশোক সেন
Ashoke Sen at Harvard
Born	1956 (age 55–56)
Residence	India
Nationality	Indian
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Fermilab Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Harish-Chandra Research Institute
Alma mater	Sailendra Sirkar Vidyalaya Presidency College, Kolkata Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur State University of New York at Stony Brook
Doctoral advisor	George Sterman
Known for	String Theory

Ashoke Sen (Bengali: অশোক সেন), FRS, (born 1956) is an Indian theoretical physicist. He has made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality,^[1] which was influential in changing the course of research in the field. He pioneered the study of unstable D-branes and made the famous Sen conjecture about open string tachyon condensation on such branes.^[2] His description of rolling tachyons^[3] has been influential in string cosmology. He has also co-authored many important papers on string field theory. One of his most recent contributions include the entropy function formalism for extremal black holes and its applications to attractors. His current research interests are centered around the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates for black holes in string theory. Of his nearly 200 research papers, as many as 47 papers have over 100 citations each.^[4]

Sen received his bachelor’s of science degree in 1975 from Calcutta University, and his master’s three years later from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He did his doctoral work in physics at Stony Brook University, where he graduated in 1982, subsequently spending the next three years as a post-doc at Fermilab and another two and a half at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). In March 1988, he moved back to India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Since 1995 he has been a full professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute. Between 1998 and 2003, Sen visited the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, U.K., as Rothschild Visiting Professor, and, between 2004 and 2005, was at MIT as Morningstar Visiting Professor. He is married to Dr. Sumathi Rao, a condensed matter physicist at HRI.

Sen was awarded the ICTP Prize in 1989^[5] the S.S. Bhatnagar award in 1994 and the Padma Shri in 2001. In 1998 Sen was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.

The Outlook magazine of April 23, 2007 has listed him amongst India's 25 people who will not make it to the power list, yet have made significant contributions to society.

He is also the recipient of the Infosys Prize in the Mathematical Sciences for the year 2009.^[6]

References

• Thomson Honours Leading Indian Scientists Five people receive the "Thomson Citation Laureate Award", including physics professor Ashoke Sen of the Harish-Chandra Research Institute.
• The Hindu, Sunday, January 7, 2001: Stringing together the ultimate law States that Dr. Ashoke Sen of HRI has "made several important contributions to the String Theory".

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