CONTENTS

Announcements
S.D. Mahanti, Michigan State University

Message from the President of ACIPA
Jeeva Anandan, University of South Carolina

A Look-back at Four Decades of Research
George Sudarshan, University of Texas, Austin

J. C. Bose's Contributions to Science
Meher H. Engineer, J. C. Bose Institute, Calcutta

Growth of Ultra-hard Carbon-based Material
Saibal Mitra, University of Tulsa, Tulsa

We Hear That ...
S.D. Mahanti, Michigan State University
Surajit Sen, SUNY-Buffalo

LIST OF CURRENT OFFICE BEARERS

President: Jeeva Anandan, Univ. of South Carolina, jeeva@sc.edu
Executive Secretary: Surajit Sen, SUNY at Buffalo, sen@dynamics.physics.buffalo.edu
Editor: S.D. Mahanti, Michigan State Univ., mahanti@pa.msu.edu
Secretary: Somnath Pal, Pennsylvania State Univ., spal@phys.psu.edu
Treasurer: Ruby N. Ghosh, Michigan St. Univ., ghosh@pa.msu.edu

ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE

S. D. Mahanti, Department of Physics
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
Phone: 517 355 9710; Fax: 517 353 4500

NEW OFFICE-BEARERS OF ACIPA

The following persons have been elected as office-bearers of the ACIPA from January 1, 2000.

President: Abhay Ashtekar. He received his B. Sc (Hon) from Bombay University and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1974). Currently he holds the Eberly Chair in Physics and is the Director of the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Penn State University. The research program he leads has received wide attention and was highlighted also in semi-popular publications such as Discover, Mosaic, Science, and Scientific American. The New York Times published his profile last April. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Executive Secretary: Alok Kumar. He received his Ph.D. from Kanpur University (1980) and is an Associate Professor of Physics at SUNY, Oswego. His research interests are in the fields of atomic physics, chemical physics, history of science, and science education. He received the SUNY Chancellor's award for Excellence in Teaching (in 1997) and is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany. He was the president of ACIPA during 1995-97.

Editor: Subhendra D. Mahanti. He received his M. Sc. degree from Allahabad University in 1963 and Ph.D. from University of California, Riverside in 1968. He joined Michigan State University in 1970 and became a Professor of Physics in 1981. He has been visiting Professor at IISc(Bangalore), TIFR(Bombay), JNU(Delhi), IIT(Madras), IOP(Bhubaneswar), Max Planck Institute(Stuttgart), and University of Antwerp. His area of research is condensed matter theory. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Treasurer: Sarada G. Rajeev. He received his Ph. D. from the University of Syracuse (1984) and joined University of Rochester in 1987, where he has been an Associate Professor since 1992. His area of research is elementary particle theory.

ACIPA GET-TOGETHERS IN MARCH AND APRIL 2000

There will be ACIPA get-togethers at both the March Meeting and the April Meeting of the APS. In March, the get-together will be on Wednesday, March 22, 2000 at 7:30 PM in the Carver Room of the Minneapolis Hilton and Towers. In April, the meeting will be at 7:30 PM on Sunday, April 30, at the Conference hotel in Long Beach, CA. The meeting room has not been assigned so far. Details of the get-togethers will be sent to you by e-mail later.

APS KILAMBI RAMAVATARAM FELLOW

Dr. Mahantappa S. Jogad, a senior Lecturer at Sharanabasaveshwar College of Science in Gulbarga, Karnataka, India will spend one year (August 2000 --- July 2001) in the US as the sixth APS Kilambi Ramavataram Fellow. The Ramavataram fund was established in 1983 through donations from the family and friends of Dr. Ramavataram, an Indian-born teacher and researcher in nuclear and molecular physics who passed away in 1977. Its aim is to improve undergraduate physics teaching in India by providing outstanding physics teachers in Indian institutions with the opportunity to get exposed to the latest physics teaching techniques in North America. Dr. Jogad has 19 years of teaching experience, with a long-standing interest in developing low-cost physics experiments. He also has ten years of research experience in the area of Thin Film Solar Cells and the use of glass ceramics for various applications. He will be visiting three institutions in the US: Michigan State University (East Lansing), University of Nebraska (Lincoln), and University of Missouri (Columbia). He can be contacted by sending e-mail to anantaraman@nscl.msu.edu

The current issue presents three articles. There are two articles of historical significance. One, by Professor E. C. G. Sudarshan of University of Texas reminiscing on his own research. The article by Professor Meher H. Engineer of J. C. Bose Institute in Calcutta who is also the President of the Calcutta Chapter of the Indian Physics Association, gives a historical perspective of many contributions of J. C. Bose to physics. The third article is a semi-technical one and is by Professor Saibal Mitra of University of Tulsa, describing his research activities in the area of ultra hard carbon-based materials.

We end by mentioning two crucial points. Please renew your membership for the year 2000 by sending a check for the appropriate amount and the completed form on the last page of this newsletter to our new treasurer, Dr Sarada G. Rajeev. Please also seriously consider becoming a Life Member. Those who have already renewed are identified by a % sign in front of their names on the address labels, and Life Members by a %% sign.

Please contribute to the Newsletter by expressing your views on issues of common interest and by providing (2-3 pages of ascii) write-ups on research problems of interest to you. Also we would like to hear comments on the articles we have already published and also how we can improve the quality of the newsletter. We thank members who have made several thoughtful suggestions for improving this newsletter.

The article by E.C. George Sudarshan describes some of the highlights of his illustrious scientific career. Sudarshan was awarded the ACIPA Distinguished Scientist Prize for 1999 at the Annual Meeting of the ACIPA in Atlanta on March 14, 1999. He was honored for his many fundamental contributions to physics, which include the discovery of the V-A theory of weak interactions with Robert Marshak, the equivalence theorem of quantum optics, the theory of unstable particle decays, quantum mechanics of dual spaces, a simple and elegant proof of the spin-statistics theorem, and the introduction of tachyons. The discovery of the V-A theory, which superseded the Fermi theory of weak interactions, makes Sudarshan the only physicist of Indian origin, apart from S. N. Bose -- founder of quantum statistics -- and Abdus Salam -- co-founder of the standard model -- to discover a new law of physics.

Sudarshan has, over the years, emphasized the need for institutions that would help Indian physicists. The ACIPA, of which he is a Life Member, is such an organization. One way in which we could help Indian physics is by setting up scholarships in India for very gifted undergraduate physics students, which was suggested to us by Sitaram Shastry (SUNY, Plattsburgh). The support that these scholarships would provide to deserving students and the stimulus the competition would provide to other candidates may help to strengthen and improve the scientific and technological base of India. Also, even if this Scholarship program produces one student of the caliber of J.C. Bose, M.N. Saha, S.N. Bose, C.V. Raman, S. Chandrasekhar, or E. C. G. Sudarshan, it would have justified itself. The Indian Association of Physics Teachers has agreed to administer these scholarships in India.

We therefore appeal to you to send your contributions for this Scholarship to the newly elected Treasurer, Sarada G. Rajeev (Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627-0171). We suggest $30 per person, but any contribution will be appreciated. Our plans are to invest this fund and use the interests and dividends to fund the Scholarship every year. We hope that the next Millennium would usher in a new era for physics in India.

In conclusion, I am very pleased to welcome the distinguished new office-bearers, introduced above, who have been unanimously elected to begin office during January 2000 for a term of two years. I also thank very much those members of the outgoing Executive Committee and all others who have given me their help and support during my term as president.

After my period as Research Student at TIFR working under the supervision of Bernard Peters and Kundan Singwi (and Homi Bhabha, in the last year) I joined the University of Rochester as a Graduate Student. I had met Robert Marshak at TIFR and got to write the notes on his lectures on meson-nucleon scattering. He suggested that I work on Particle Physics, what used to be called Elementary Particles. As a first topic he asked me to calculate meson production in antiproton annihilation. The next topic was on electromagnetic properties of baryons. Susumu Okubo, Robert Marshak and I published a paper on broken baryons symmetry and sum rules for electromagnetic properties; Okubo went on to develop the method for SU(3) and obtained the famous mass formulae for baryon and meson masses. Alan Macfarlane and I completed the electromagnetic mass differences formulae of Sidney Coleman and Sheldon Glashow: we computed the sigma-lambda transition mass and transition magnetic moment.

The year 1956 was an exciting year. Parity violation was predicted by T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang: and its verification and accurate measurements were carried out by C.S. Wu in association with E. Ambler, et al. from the National Bureau of Standards. Corresponding work was done by Leon Lederman and collaborators for the Muon processes. But the more one obtained new data on nuclear beta decay, the more confused became the situation regarding the specific form of the beta interaction. In addition, the attractive hypothesis of universal Fermi interaction by Jaime Tiomno and John Wheeler did not seem to fit in. Recall that in 1955 the most favored beta decay combination was scalar plus tensor (with no parity violation).

Professor Marshak suggested that I study this problem and continued his generous help in discussing my findings and supplying some answers to questions. After about six months of intense study of the empirical data two things became clear to me. First, there was no beta interaction consistent with all the data; and therefore some carefully done experiments should be wrong. Second, the only possibility of a universal Fermi interaction lay in having an axial vector component in beta decay. The details on the beta decay angular correlations could be consistent with a scalar-tensor or a vector-axial vector structure. With these, Marshak and I had all the necessary results of the Universal V-A interaction by the time of the Rochester Conference in 1957. But I did not get a chance to present this discovery and had the strange experience of listening helplessly to distinguished scientists puzzling over a problem that I had solved already!

That summer, Marshak was at RAND Corporation in Santa Monica; so I spent a month in Los Angeles. By this time the work was done but not publicly presented. One day in June, Marshak arranged a lunch with Murray Gell-Mann, Leona Marshall, Ronald Bryan, A.H. Wapstra and others at a Santa Monica restaurant. I was asked to give a report on our work on weak interactions beginning with a survey of the crucial experimental results, the clear evidence of inconsistency amongst them and our resolution of the puzzling situation and the hypothesis of the universal Fermi interaction of the V-A form with left chiral fields. Wapstra added some comments on the status of some experiments. Gell-Mann was very appreciative of the presentation and gave his blessings. I had also mentioned that the choice of the interaction that Marshak and I made required four crucial experiments to be wrong. Some of these were done by, or under the supervision of people like C.S. Wu and Herbert Anderson. These included the angular correlation in He%$^b$ beta decay, the sign of the muon polarization, the decay of oriented neutrons and the branching ratio in pion decay into the electron-neutrino mode. We suggested that these experiments be redone. To our gratification they were all done with the reversal of the wrong predictions within the year, so that the 1958 ``Rochester Conference" at CERN (to which I was not invited) recognized that the chiral V-A interaction was correct for all the classic weak interactions.

Professor Marshak was to attend the Conference on Mesons and Newly Discovered Particles in Padua-Venice in 1957 September. He asked me to compile a joint paper on the V-A interaction; this was done in June and was titled ``The Nature of the Four-Fermion Interaction". I left it with Marshak, who got it typed in Rochester and presented it at the Conference. He was satisfied that this presentation and the preprint dated 16 September 1957 (my 26th birthday!) was tantamount to publication.

I went that September to join Julian Schwinger at Harvard as a postdoctoral fellow. Nobody there in the theory group knew anything about the developments in weak interaction, nor did they care. But Sheldon Glashow told me about a manuscript written by Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman postulating a V-A form for beta decay that was submitted to the Physical Review. I called Professor Marshak on the phone, but he assured me that our priority was protected by the Rochester preprint and by the conference presentation. That was a mistake since most people would not acknowledge having seen or heard of our work (including the late J.J.Sakurai who got the preprint and a private presentation by Marshak in the latter's office in Rochester). Later it turned out that even a person like Robert Oppenheimer did not read our paper: he told me so in person and I have no reason to doubt his word. Anyone who read our paper and the beautiful paper by Gell-Mann and Feynman could not fail to notice the essential difference. We analyzed the data and pointed to the inevitable choice of the Chiral V-A form despite contradicting experiments, while they knew our work and elaborated on its elegance and they added the important concept of conserved vector current. The Padua-Venice proceedings took two years to appear. But since then P.K. Kabir's collection "The Development of Weak Interaction Theory" (Gordon and Breach) has reprinted both these papers for comparison. But many people chose to ignore it. In my childhood I was told that: You can wake up a sleeping person, but you cannot do anything about a person who pretends to be asleep.

I will briefly mention some other discoveries before closing. Two of my first batch of graduate students: Thomas Jordan and Douglas Currie and I proved a No-Interaction Theorem in Relativistic Classical Mechanics; it asserts that a Hamiltonian mechanics of particles interacting mutually and with trajectories which transform as world-lines has to be trivial. This puts an end to several futile attempts to construct such a nontrivial theory. A resolution came only with the use of a constrained relativistic system by Arthur Komar and followed up by Narasimha Mukunda, Joshua Goldberg and I, two decades later.

Second is the method of analytic continuation of the normed vector spaces of quantum theory. It was implicitly used in our construction of unitary representations of noncompact groups in a basis which itself is noncompact. But explicitly it was used by Sudarshan, Vittorio Gorini and Charles Chiu in 1976. The idea was to extend the Hamiltonian formalism to include unstable states. Over the years I have done more work on both Hamiltonian and Liouvillian dynamics and formulated the general theory in terms of dual spaces. Despite this, claimants to this work abound, many of them my friends and collaborators.

The final discovery is the stronger version of the Spin-Statistics theorem and the TCP Theorem. Traditional wisdom was that this could be proved only in relativistic quantum field theory. To me it was remarkable that the physical application of quantum statistics is in nonrelativistic physics and that hence there should be a formalism of quantum field theory without requiring Lorentz invariance. In 1968 while I was on leave from the Syracuse University for a semester in Delhi and Bangalore I constructed a proof which required only rotational invariance and based on the symmetry (antisymmetry) of the scalar product of two tensors (spinors); and then I could demonstrate that tensor fields obey Bose statistics and spinor fields obey Fermi statistics. This was published in the proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences the same year. I also presented it in the Nobel Conference in 1968, the same conference where Abdus Salam presented his electroweak theory. Again, I discussed it at the Bose Conference in Bangalore ten years later. Recently in a book I have published with Ian Duck this proof is again given. It turns out that TCP theorem also obtains.

In most of my work I have to recognize that discoveries do not confer credit on their discoverers; and that great and not-so-great scientists can be small men. But most of all I have learned to value those gifts of insight, irrespective of what is the official position. Not with pride but with awe since the insight came to me, they were not my doing; that I was a channel for the vision. This is part of my tradition, to be a seer, to be a rishi.

T. P. Pradhan has pointed out, (1), that J. C. Bose observed tunneling in 1897 while doing pioneering experiments on millimeter waves, (2). Sketching an arrangement identical to the one Bose used, Feynman, in his famous Lectures, (3), argued that Total Internal Reflection cannot really be total if light is a wave. Then, energy will appear on the far side of the total internal reflection barrier -- which is what tunneling is all about. The experiment was too hard to do with light. But Feynman said: "it is easy to demonstrate with three centimeter waves"! No credit is given to Bose's pioneering work, which is documented in Sommerfeld's famous text book on Optics (4). Subsequent technical advances permitted the first optical version of Bose's experiment to be done quite recently, (5). The experimenters do cite the 1897 paper of Bose.

Feynman's neglect of Bose, typical of post-war writers of physics text books, was not shared by earlier writers: Bose's contributions were written up for the Encyclopedia Brittanica by J. J. Thomson,(7). Thomson also wrote the Foreword to Bose's Collected Works (8). In it he remarks that Bose's work "marks the revival in India, of interest in researches in Physical Sciences".

K. C . Gupta, the keynote speaker at a recent (1996) Asia Pacific Microwave Conference, pointed out (9) that the local oscillator of the 1.3 mm SIS junction multi-beam receiver installed at the National Radio Astronomy Telescope, Kitt Peak, USA in 1996, feeds eight channels using optical couplings. The level of oscillator power needs to be carefully maintained, a need that was met by using mm wave attenuators for each of the eight feeds. The attenuator designer, John Payne, closely followed Bose's simple and elegant 1897 prescription: two 45-degree prisms separated by an air gap! What Bose did one hundred years ago is still of practical use.

The story of Bose's contributions (it is not well enough known, perhaps because the Collected Works, (8), were long out of print) emphasizes that micro and millimeter wave technology is hardly modern: the basics were worked out by 1900. In 1902 Larmor, (10), recorded the suggestion, made in 1883 by Fitzgerald, that a discharging Leyden Jar would radiate Maxwellian waves whose reality Hertz proved in 1888. By then Maxwell, who predicted them in 1863, had already died. Hertz produced 66-cm radiation by feeding a dipole antenna with the output of a spark gap generator activated, in turn, by the discharge of a Ruhmkorff's coil. The detector was a simple loop of wire with a small air gap; a visible spark across the gap indicated the presence of the Maxwell waves.

Hertz called his radiation "electric waves". He wrote: "As soon as I had succeeded in proving that the action of an electric oscillation spreads out as a wave in space, I planned experiments with the object of concentrating the action and making it perceptible at greater distances by putting the primary conductor in the focal line of a large parabolic mirror". He was trying to get a parallel beam, but his mirror (made from sheet zinc and mounted on a timber frame) had horizontal and vertical apertures of 1.2 and 2.0 meters, a focal length of just 12.5 cm, and a depth of 70 cm, so the emerging beam couldn't have been all that parallel! Despite this Hertz claimed that his "electric waves" had properties predicted by Maxwell theory, thereby confirming Maxwell's speculation that light was an electromagnetic wave.

The comment: "It is a fascinating idea that the processes in air which we have been investigating represent to us on a million-fold larger scale the same processes that go on in the neighborhood of a Fresnel mirror or between the glass plates used for exhibiting Newton's rings", shows that Hertz knew he had discovered radio-frequency optics. His beautiful experiments set off a chain of no less beautiful investigations, mostly by Lodge, Righi, Flaming, Bose and Rayleigh. Lodge in Britain demonstrated powerful high frequency waves on wires (todays transmission line). Marconi's teacher, Righi, laid down the foundations of microwave optics by working at frequencies of 3 and 10 gigahertz. J. C. Bose began work on the problem sometime in 1894, probably inspired by reading Lodge's book "The work of Hertz and some of his successors", published in 1894. Bose knew Hertz had failed to overcome the reflections, from the walls of the laboratory, which are largs at a wavelength of 66 cm. At that wavelength huge reflectors and prisms are needed to verify the laws of reflection and refraction etc. He began developing spark gap generators for higher frequencies. The effort was immediately successful as his very first paper (read before the Asiatic Society, Calcutta in 1895) on the subject reveals.

Bose's primary scientific objective was to confirm Maxwell's theory completely. So he decided to pass the electric waves through optically birefringent crystals like Iceland Spar. He wrote: "It was thought that the analogy between electric radiation and light would be rendered more complete if the same class of substances that polarize the light were also found to polarize the electric ray". He goes on to remark that although this seems to require the use of very large crystals, given that the wavelength of the electric waves was so large, he was able to obtain "polarization effects with crystals of moderate size. ``This I was able to do by reducing the wavelength of electric waves to about 5 mm or so".

Indeed, for his lecture at the Royal Institution in 1897 he used an entire millimeter wave bench -- which he transported from far away Calcutta in a portable case of moderate size. Here is how he justifies the use of millimeter waves: "For experimental investigation it is also necessary to have a narrow pencil of electric radiation, and this is very difficult to obtain, unless waves of a very short wavelength are used. With large waves diverging in all directions and curling around corners all attempts at accurate work is futile....All these drawbacks were ultimately removed by making suitable radiators emitting very short waves; the three radiators here exhibited give rise to waves of approximately 1/4 inch, 1/2 inch and 1 inch in length".

Turning to the development of wave guides, Ramsay (11) praised Lodge, the first person (in mid-1895) to enclose an emitter in a hollow cylindrical tube. Between 1895 and 1897 Bose used hollow tubes of square and cylindrical cross section as wave guides. Of these technical advancements, Ramsay observes: "In radiating to free space from the open end of a hollow pipe they found a directive radiator unknown to optics"; he goes on to add: "Bose was to make the next significant step" viz., the use of pyramidal electromagnetic horns as receiving antennae. Reasoning precisely as today's trained microwave engineer would, Bose thought that an increase of the collecting area would enable him to increase the sensitivity with which he could detect the Maxwell waves.

These developments inspired the landmark (1897) theoretical paper of Lord Rayleigh on the modes of propagation of electromagnetic waves in wave guides of rectangular and circular cross section. Bose had been Rayleigh's student at Cambridge and had kept his former teacher informed about his millimeter wave researches. Rayleigh, a great admirer and supporter of his ex-student's work, visited Bose's laboratory at the Presidency College, Calcutta and urged him to visit Europe occasionally. How fascinating to see the guru, stimulated by the sishya's accomplishments, produced one of his finest works. Rayleigh's solution to the mode problem was complete. Completeness was a characteristic feature of the work of the "Hertzians" who were also remarkably prescient: prompted by the great advances of a few years, Lodge proposed, and even attempted, microwave Radio Astronomy of the Sun!

Turning his attention to detection, Bose took Lodge's crude "coherers", which consisted of metal filings in loose contact, pressed between two metal electrodes, and made many changes in their design. He reached the point where all he needed was a single point contact on a metal plate. He showed that the materials used by him, in this last device, (clearly a point contact rectifier) fell into two groups. In one group, the current increased upon absorption of radiation; he called these materials positive. In the other, the current decreased when radiation fell on the device and these he called negative. Iron was positive whereas Potassium was negative, for example. Finally he perfected a device, made of galena, which could detect electromagnetic waves whose wavelengths stretched from the millimeter end of the spectrum all the way to the violet. This he called an "Electric Eye" and patented in the USA. Pearson and Brattain (Proc. IRE, 1955) correctly credit Bose with the use of semiconductor crystals for detecting radio waves. Brattain should have known. He received, along with Schockley and Bardeen, a Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor.

Bose measured the refractive indices of a number of materials (for Sulphur he quotes the value 1.734), and the wavelengths of the radiations he produced to excellent accuracy; he developed efficient polarizers using fibrous natural materials: a twisted bundle of jute fibers sufficed to rotate the plane of polarization of millimeter waves. Bose thought of these jute bundles as macroscopic structures that modeled the molecular behavior of sugar molecules in solution.

The way Bose got into the the second, great, botanical phase of his career owes a lot to his millimeter wave work. During 1899-1902, while working on the properties of coherers, Bose began to feel that they responded to radiative excitations in ways very similar to those of living systems; apparently he believed in Waller's dictum that life's most delicate and universal sign lay in its electric response to stimulation. He pursued this idea steadily, and studied the electrophysiology of plants for the next thirty years, devising many remarkably sensitive instruments to record the mechanical and electrical responses of plants to stimuli. He was quite a genius in devising sensitive equipment as was first evident in his millimeter wave research. He could detect growth rates of 0.0035 millimeters per minute. His Magnetic Crescograph was able to magnify small motions of plants by factors as large as fifty million etc. Some of these instruments can be seen in the Museum that forms a part of today's Bose Institute. He also used fine platinum wires to locate where the actively metabolizing layer lay in a plant etc etc.

Not content with all that activity, his practical patriotism led him to establish the Institute that bears his name, after collecting over Rs. 1.1 million as donations and acquiring, with Government help, a large piece of land adjoining his house in Calcutta (12). The well planned Institute, which was opened on November 30, 1917, was his favorite child in a very real sense for Bose was childless; the Main Campus of today's Bose Institute is still located in that very property. He dedicated the Institute, explicitly, to the "Service of the Indian Nation". It conducts research in problems of both physical and life sciences.

Bose arranged for all his earthly possessions to be given away in various endowments upon his death (which occurred on November 22, 1937). The gesture is unsurprising, for, the last paragraph of his 1917 dedication address recalls with admiration the famous story where Emperor Asoka gave away all his possessions. When all that remained was one half of an Amlaki (13) fruit, the Emperor cried aloud that that, too, be accepted -- as his final gift. The address continues: "Asoka's emblem of the Amlaki will be seen on the cornices of the Institute, and towering above all is the symbol of the thunderbolt. It was the rishi Dhadichi, the pure and blameless, who offered his life so that the divine weapon, the thunderbolt, might be fashioned out of his bones to smite evil and exalt righteousness. It is but half of the Amlaki that we can offer now. But the past shall be reborn in a yet nobler future".

REFERENCES
1) J. C. Bose Endowment Lecture, Bose Institute, December 1989.
2) J. C. Bose, "On the influence of air space on total reflection of electric radiation", Proc. Roy. Soc. A 62, 301-310, (1897).
3) R. P. Feynman, R. B. Leighton and M. Sands, "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", Vol II, Addison-Wesley, Reading 1964), Chap.3, pp. 12-13.
4) A. Sommerfeld, Optics, Acad. Press, New York, 1964, pp. 32-33.
5) Y. Mizobuchi and Y.Ohtake, Phys. Lett., A168, pp. 1-5, (1992).
6) P. Ghose, D. Home and G. S. Agarwal, Phys. Lett. A 153, pp. 403-406, (1991).
7) J. J. Thomson, Encyclopedia Brittanica, 9th Edition.M
8) J. C. Bose, Collected Physical Papers, Longmans Green \& Co., New York, 1927.
9) K. C. Gupta, Key Note Address, 1996 Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference (ed., R.S.Gupta), Vol. I, pp.3-11.
10) Joseph Larmor ed., "The Scientific writings of F. G. Fitzgerald", Longmans Green (London), 1902; he says on pg. 100 that Fitzgerald made his suggestion at the 1883 Dublin meeting of the British Association.
11) J. F. Ramsay. "Antenna and Waveguide Technique before 1900", Proc. IRE, Vol. 46, pp 405-415.
12) D. M. Bose, "Jagadis Chandra Bose -- A Life Sketch", in the Acharya Jagadis Chandra Bose Post-Centennial Silver Jubilee Birth Celebration Commemoration Volume, (Bose Institute, eds. S. Chanda and B. Mitra), pp.1-27, (1983).
13) The standard botanical name for this common Indian fruit is Emblica officinalis.

The synthesis of novel materials with extreme properties is a continuous challenge for materials scientists. In particular, growth of ultra-hard materials is an area that has attracted a lot of attention for its obvious technological implications. Hard materials are solids that have hardness ranging from 8 to 10 on the Mohs scale. On this scale, quartz (SiO2) has a hardness of 7 while diamond has a hardness of 10. Ultra-hard materials are defined as those materials whose hardness is comparable to that of diamond.

What is hardness? Hardness is defined as the resistance of a material towards elastic and plastic deformation and is best represented in terms of its bulk modulus. The bulk modulus, and hence the hardness of a material, is dependent on the bonding energy, the molar volume and its crystal structure. From ab initio and semi-empirical calculations a scaling relation has been derived. The bulk modulus may be written as

B = (1971 - 220lambda)/d**(0.35),

where d is the bond length and lambda is a parameter that takes ionicity into account. lambda=0 for homopolar solid of group IV elements and lambda=2 for heteropolar solids of group III-IV, III-V, and II-VI elements. It is clear that as ionicity increases, B decreases. Thus, covalent solids based on carbon and nitrogen are excellent candidates for ultra-hard materials. In particular, the compound beta-C3N4 has a bond length d = 1.47 A and lambda=0.5 and hence is a material of high bulk modulus comparable to that of diamond. Since beta-C3N4 has the same structure as beta-Si3N4, it is only a partially coordinated tetrahedral structure. The unit cell is hexagonal with two formula units of beta-C3N4. The C atoms are sp**3 hybridized and are tetrahedrally surrounded by N atoms. Nitrogen has a planar trigonal coordination (sp**2 hybridized). Calculation of the velocity of sound, 1.1 x 10**6 m/s, also suggests high thermal velocity.

It is no surprise that the possibility of the existence of beta-C3N4, a material that may replace diamond in applications at high temperatures where diamond is unstable, has triggered a lot of excitement. Many groups have attempted to grow beta-C3N4 with mixed success.

Our research at University of Tulsa focuses on the growth of diamond and carbon nitride films by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) where a mixture of gases is activated by a number of means. In our lab, we activate gases either by hot-filament or by microwave plasma. We are using a mixture of methane, nitrogen and/or ammonia for carbon nitride. The substrate of choice is single crystal silicon. Under the "right" conditions, the material of choice may be deposited on the substrate. We have grown CN films primarily via hot-filament CVD. The "quality" of the material may be manipulated by controlling various parameters like the flow rates and ratio of methane and nitrogen, filament-substrate distance, substrate temperature and so on. Our initial X-ray diffraction characterization studies have suggested the presence of beta-C3N4 phase along with yet other unidentified phases of carbon nitride. Obviously, more work is needed to identify the condition that will encourage the growth of the beta-C3N4 phase over other "parasitic" phases. Given the complexity of the underlying chemistry of the growth mechanism, this is indeed a very challenging task.

The final challenge is to accomplish this cutting-edge research solely with the help of undergraduate students. The Physics Department at the University of Tulsa is a primarily undergraduate department. Though research is encouraged, teaching remains an important calling for the faculty. However, the line between teaching and research is increasingly blurred as students work on projects like these as a part of their senior theses. It is increasingly acknowledged in the education community that research is an integral part of learning and the opportunity to do "hands on" research and to publish the results is one of the best education that we can provide to our students.

We would like to congratulate Prof. Umesh Garg (University of Notre Dam), Prof. Puru Jena (Virginia Commonwealth University), Prof. Ram-Mohan L. Ramdas (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), and Prof. Priya Vashishta (Louisiana State University) for becoming Fellows of the American Physical Society in 1999.

Govind Krishnaswami, who earned a double Bachelors degree in May 1999 in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Rochester, has received the $5000 Leroy Apker Award, the American Physical Society's highest honor for undergraduate research. Krishnaswami's nomination was based on research he has been conducting with Professor Sarada Rajeev in exploring the structure of the proton. He is now a graduate student at the University of Rochester.