C V RAMAN

• Raman was born to a family of Sanskrit scholars in Trichy (present-day Tiruchirapalli) in the Madras Presidency in 1888
• At the age of only 16, He received a BA degree from Presidency College in Madras, and was placed first in his class
• While studying for his MA degree, at the age of 18, he got published in the Philosophical Magazine: this was the first research paper ever published by Presidency College
• Due to his ill health, he was unable to travel abroad for further education. Thus, in 1907, he got married and settled down in Calcutta as an assistant accountant general
• While still a full-time civil servant, Raman began after-hours research at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS)
• Raman raised the profile of IACS, doing some award-winning research as well as conducting public demonstrations with charisma
• At the age of 29, he finally resigned from his civil services job and took up a professorship in Presidency College, Calcutta
• By 1921, CV Raman had gained a solid reputation as a top scientific mind both in India and in the West
• That year, he made his first journey to England. It was on the return journey that Raman would make an observation that would change his life and science forever
• While passing through the Mediterranean Sea, Raman was most fascinated by the sea’s deep blue colour
• He soon found out that the colour of the sea was the result of the scattering of sunlight by the water molecules
• Fascinated by the phenomenon of light-scattering, Raman and his collaborators in Calcutta began to conduct extensive scientific experiments on the matter  experiments that would eventually lead to his eponymous discovery.

• Raman Effect refers to the phenomenon in which when a stream of light passes through a liquid, a fraction of the light scattered by the liquid is of a different colour
• This happens due to the change in the wavelength of light that occurs when a light beam is deflected by molecules.
• In general, when light interacts with an object, it can either be reflected, refracted or transmitted
• One of the things that scientists look at when light is scattered is if the particle it interacts with is able to change its energy
• The Raman Effect is when the change in the energy of the light is affected by the vibrations of the molecule or material under observation, leading to a change in its wavelength
• In their first report to Nature, titled “A New Type of Secondary Radiation,” CV Raman and co-author KS Krishnan wrote that 60 different liquids had been studied, and all showed the same result – a tiny fraction of scattered light had a different colour than the incident light
• “It is thus,” Raman said, “a phenomenon whose universal nature has to be recognised.”
• Raman would go on to verify these observations using a spectroscope, publishing the quantitative findings in the Indian Journal of Physics on March 31, 1928
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• CV Raman’s discovery took the world by storm as it had deep implications far beyond Raman’s original intentions
• As Raman himself remarked in his 1930 Nobel Prize speech, “The character of the scattered radiations enables us to obtain an insight into the ultimate structure of the scattering substance.”
• For quantum theory, in vogue in the scientific world at the time, Raman’s discovery was crucial
• The discovery would also find its use in chemistry, giving birth to a new field known as Raman spectroscopy as a basic analytical tool to conduct nondestructive chemical analysis for both organic and inorganic compounds
• With the invention of lasers and the capabilities to concentrate much stronger beams of light, the uses of Raman spectroscopy have only ballooned over time
• Today, this method has a wide variety of applications, from studying art and other objects of cultural importance in a non-invasive fashion to finding drugs hidden inside luggage at customs