ROFESSOR Deepak Dhar, a physicist and emeritus faculty at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, has been selected to receive the prestigious Boltzmann Medal for 2022, a senior official from the premier facility said on Monday. He is one of the two physicists selected for the award, the second awardee being Prof. John Hopfield from Princeton University. The Boltzmann Medal, which has been instituted by C3 Commission on Statistical Physics of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), is given out once in three years and honours outstanding achievements in statistical physics.

 

Dhar has been given the award for his seminal contributions to several areas of statistical physics, including exact solutions of self-organised criticality models, inter-facial growth, universal long-time relaxation in disordered magnetic systems, exact solutions in percolation and cluster counting problems and definition of the spectral dimension of fractals.