Atish Dabholkar


Atish Dabholkar is an Indian theoretical physicist. He is currently the of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics with the rank of Assistant Director-General, UNESCO. Prior to that, he was head of ICTP's High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics section, and also Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at Sorbonne University in the "Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Énergies".
Well known for his research on string theory, black holes and quantum gravity, Dabholkar is an elected fellow
of the Indian Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest Indian science prize awarded by the Prime Minister of India, for his contributions to physical sciences in 2006. He was awarded the Chaire d'Excellence of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche in France in 2007. He is also a recipient of the National Leadership award from the President of India in 2008.

Biography

Atish Dabholkar earned his Masters in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1985 and his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton University in 1990 under the guidance of Jeffrey A. Harvey. Subsequently, he worked at Rutgers University and then at Harvard University as a post-doctoral associate. After spending two years at California Institute of Technology as a senior research fellow, he returned to India in 1996 to take up the position of a professor of theoretical physics at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research till 2010. In November 2019 he was appointed as Director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. Prior to that, he was head of ICTP's High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics section International Centre for Theoretical Physics and a Directeur de Recherche of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at Sorbonne Universités in the "Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Énergies" since 2007. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University during 2003–04 and at CERN during 2012.

Contributions to Physics

In his work in collaboration with Jeffrey A. Harvey, Dabholkar identified a spectrum of supersymmetric states
and initiated the study of supersymmetric solitons in string theory
which played an important role in the discovery of duality symmetries in string theory and later in the study of quantum entropy of black holes.
One of his important results concerns the computation of the quantum corrections to the Bekenstein Hawking entropy of a class of black holes in string theory.
The Bhatnagar prize cites his "outstanding contributions for establishing how quantum theory modifies the entropy of black holes and his pioneering studies of supersymmetric solitons in string theory".
Dabholkar collaborated with Sameer Murthy and Don Zagier to discover a connection between the quantum entropy of black holes and the mathematics of mock modular forms
introduced by Ramanujan a century ago
. In his subsequent work with Pavel Putrov and Edward Witten he showed that mock modularity is generic and essential for exhibiting the duality symmetries of quantum gauge theories and M-theory.
Dabholkar was the coorganizer of the Strings 2001 Conference held at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India.
A partial list of his publications is at the online article repository of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Selected publications

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