Ashoke Sen

About Ashoke Sen

Ashoke Sen, FRS (born 1956) is an Indian theoretical physicist and distinguished professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad. He also is the Morningstar Visiting professor at MIT. His main area of work is String Theory. He was among the first recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize “for opening the path to the realisation that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory”. This richly endowed prize has been set up by the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner for rewarding scientific breakthroughs. Ashoke Sen was the only recipient from Asia of this inaugural prize.

Early life

He was born in Calcutta, and is the elder son of Anil Kumar Sen, a former professor of physics at the Scottish Church College, and Gouri Sen, a homemaker.

After completing his schooling from the Sailendra Sircar Vidyalaya in Kolkata, he earned his bachelor’s of science degree in 1975 from the Presidency College under the University of Calcutta, and his master’s three years later from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He did his doctoral work in physics at Stony Brook University.

Career

Ashoke Sen made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality, which was influential in changing the course of research in the field. He pioneered the study of unstable D-branes and made the famous Sen conjecture about open string tachyon condensation on such branes. His description of rolling tachyons has been influential in string cosmology. He has also co-authored many important papers on string field theory. In 1998 he won the fellowship of the Royal Society on being nominated by the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. His contributions include the entropy function formalism for extremal black holes and its applications to attractors. His current research interests are centered around the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates of black holes.