Timir Datta

Timir Datta is an Indian-American physicist and a professor of physics in the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, South Carolina. His research specialty is high transition temperature superconductors. However, his research interests are wide ranging and include plasma physics, gravitation, the principle of equivalence for quantum systems, and the foundations of magnetism. He also is known to have been involved in the development of an anti-gravity device.

Early life and education

Datta grew up in India; his father B.N. Dutt was an eminent sugar-refining engineer. He received a master’s degree (1974) in theoretical plasma physics from Boston College under the direction of Gabor Kalman.[pub 1] While engaged in an experimental dissertation with Allen M. Herman at Tulane University in New Orleans (Ph.D, 1979), Timir also worked at the Jet Propulsion laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, as a pre-doctoral NASA research associate of Robert Somoano. His results showed[pub 2] that a quasi-one-dimensional system could be stable against Pierels transition, have metallic transport and the thermoelectric transport follows a “Nordheim-Gorter” type scaling.[pub 3] Timir also collaborated with Carl H. Brans at Loyola University New Orleans on a gravitational problem of frame dragging; in addition he worked with John Perdew on the behavior of charge density waves in jellium.

Work and research history

Datta was a NSF post-doctoral fellow with Marvin Silver and studied charge propagation in non-crystalline systems[pub 4] at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. At UNC-CH he continued his theoretical interests and worked on retarded Vander Waals potential[pub 5] with L. H. Ford. Since 1982, he has been on the faculty of the University of South Carolina in Columbia. During this period he has held a number of other positions including that of a visiting research professor[pub 6] at the NSF STC for superconductivity and department of Physics in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; visiting professor[pub 7] department of Electrical engineering, University of Nebraska at Lincoln; visiting scientist[pub 8] at the then Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI currently NREL) in Golden, Colorado; visiting scientist[pub 9] at the Allied Signal Laboratories, Morristown, NJ and visiting summer faculty[pub 10] at the Naval Research laboratory (NRL) in Washington D.C.

He collaborated with several laboratories involved with the early discoveries of high temperature superconductivity especially the team at NRL lead by Donald U Gubser and Stuart Wolf. This research group at USC was the also first to observe [pub 11] (i) bulk Meissner effect in Tl-copper oxides and thus confirm the discovery by Allen Herman's team at the University of Arkansas of high temperature superconductivity in these compounds.[1] He is coined the term "triple digit superconductivity" and also was the organizer of the so-called "woodstock-II" in New Orleans at the American Physical Society's March 1988[2] His group was also the first to observe (ii) fractional quantum hall effect in 3-dimensional carbon.[pub 12][pub 13]

Other works of Timir Datta include the question gravitational principle of equivalence and quantum mechanics.[pub 14] In a paper[pub 15] Datta et al. showed that if a metallic conductor at equilibrium in a gravitational field and acquire an electric polarization in the direction opposite to the field as first predicted by Desslar et al. then in the Einstein elevator thought experiment it will be possible to distinguish uniform gravity from dynamical acceleration.[3] In another paper[pub 16] Datta and Safko introduced the concept of gravitational localization due to disorder in space -time. He was the first to show the paradoxical relationship between the classical radius of a Dirac monopole and its Compton wavelength.[pub 17] In a paper with Raphael Tsu he derived the first quantum mechanical wave impedance formula for Schrödinger wave functions.[pub 18]

Datta is an active researcher with over 100 papers listed in the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) as of 2014.[4]

Patents

Datta was issued one US patent in 1995: "Flux-trapped superconducting magnets and method of manufacture", with two co-inventors.[5]

Anti-gravity work

Datta was involved in the university-funded development of a Gravity Generator in 1996 and 1997, with then fellow university researcher, Douglas Torr.[6] According to a leaked document from the Office of Technology Transfer at the University of South Carolina and confirmed to Wired reporter Charles Platt in 1998, the device would create a "force beam" in any desired direction and that the university planned to patent and license this device. Neither information about this university research project nor any "Gravity Generator" device was ever made public.[7]

Despite the apparent less than successful outcome of the "Gravity Generator" development effort with Torr, Datta became interested in the effects of electric fields on gravitation, expanding on Torr's theoretical work on the subject Torr published in the late 1990s.[8][9]

Selected publications

  1. ↑ G. Kalman, T. Datta, KI Golden, Approximation schemes for strongly coupled plasmas, Physical Review A 12 (3), 1125
  2. ↑ RB Somoano, A Gupta, V Hadek, T Datta, M Jones, R Deck, AM Hermann, The electrical and magnetic properties of (TTF)(I), The Journal of Chemical Physics 63, 4970; T Datta, AM Hermann, RJ Deck, RB Somoano
  3. ↑ Nordheim-Gorter like behavior and one carrier conduction in a quasi-one-dimensional system Solid State Communications 35 (11), 883-885
  4. ↑ T Datta, M Silver Schottky‐barrier profile in a‐silicon alloys Applied Physics Letters 38 (11), 903-905
  5. ↑ T Datta, LH Ford, Retarded Van der Waals potential between a conducting plane and a polarizable particle, Physics Letters A 83 (7), 314-316
  6. ↑ F Zuo, MB Salamon, T Datta, K Ghiron, H Duan, AM Hermann Forward and reverse flux creep in single crystal Tl2Ca2BaCu2 Ox superconductors Physica C: Superconductivity 176 (4), 541-546
  7. ↑ T Datta, JA Woollam, W Notohamiprodjo, Optical-absorption edge and disorder effects in hydrogenated amorphous diamondlike carbon films, Physical Review B 40 (9), 5956
  8. ↑ T Datta, R Noufi, SK Deb, Electrical conductivity of p‐type CuInSe 2 thin films Applied physics letters 47 (10), 1102-1104
  9. ↑ Superconductivity above 130 K in the Hg-Pb-Ba-Ca-Cu-O system Z Iqbal, T Datta, D Kirven, A Lungu, JC Barry, FJ Owens, AG Rinzler, D Yang ...Physical Review B 49 (17), 12322
  10. ↑ RJ Soulen Jr, MS Osofsky, M Patten, T Datta A new technique for the measurement of AC loss in second-generation HTS tapes Applied Superconductivity, IEEE Transactions on 15 (2), 2381-2384
  11. ↑ ZZ Sheng, AM Hermann, A El Ali, C Almasan, J Estrada, T Datta, RJ Matson, Superconductivity at 90 K in the Tl-Ba-Cu-O system, Physical review letters 60 (10), 937-940
  12. ↑ T. Datta et al, Observing Quantum Hall States in the Extreme Soft Limit - arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0503166.
  13. ↑ M Bleiweiss, M Yin, J Amirzadeh, H Preston, T Datta Extreme Soft Limit Observation of Quantum Hall Effect in a 3-d Semiconductor APS Meeting Abstracts 1, 11012 (2004)
  14. ↑ T Datta, M Yin, Do Quantum Systems Break The Equivalence Principle? arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.3885.
  15. ↑ T Datta, M Wescott, M Yin Electron-Lattice Systems in Weak Gravitation: The Schiff Dessler Problem, arXiv preprint arXiv:0908.2820
  16. ↑ T Datta, JL Safko, Disordered Gravitation: Localization and Diffusion Limited Dynamics of the Early Universe, QUANTUM COHERENCE, 219
  17. ↑ T Datta, The fine-structure constant, magnetic monopoles and dirac charge quantization condition, Lettere al Nuovo Cimento 37 (2), 51-54; T Datta, Coherent, Co-Operative Aspects of Monopole and Matter Interaction Monopole’83, 359-365
  18. ↑ T Datta, R Tsu, Quantum Wave Resistance of Schrodinger Functions arXiv preprint cond-mat/0311479

See also

References

External links