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Mahesh

01/03/23 09:36 AM IST

National Science Day 2023

In News
  • In 1986, the Government of India, under then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, designated February 28 as National Science Day to commemorate the announcement of the discovery of the “Raman Effect”.
  • Theme- Global Science for Global Wellbeing
Raman Effect
  • The Raman Effect was the discovery which won physicist Sir CV Raman his Nobel Prize in 1930.
  • Conducting a deceptively simple experiment, Raman discovered that when a stream of light passes through a liquid, a fraction of the light scattered by the liquid is of a different colour.
  • This discovery was immediately recognised as groundbreaking in the scientific community.
  • 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.
About 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.
  • 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.
About the discovery
  • While passing through the Mediterranean Sea, Raman was most fascinated by the sea’s deep blue colour.
  • Dissatisfied with the then-accepted answer (“the colour of the sea was just a reflection of the colour of the sky”), his curious mind delved deeper.
  • 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.
Significance
  • 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.
Source- Indian Express

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