India: Eminent nuclear physicist Bikash Sinha, a former director of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) and the Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre (VECC), died here on Friday.
Bikash Sinha, 78, who had been suffering from old age-related ailments, was a recipient of the Padma Bhushan in 2010 for his contribution to science & technology.
Condoling his demise, West Bengal Governor C V Ananda Bose said he was a personal friend, an eminent scientist and a good human being.
Born in a zamindar family of Kandi in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district, he studied physics at Presidency College in Kolkata, before pursuing higher studies in the subject at King’s College, Cambridge.
Bikash Sinha, a fellow of several academies including 3rd World Academy of Sciences, Italy, and recipient of numerous awards, contributed immensely to the field of Quark Gluon Plasma, a state of matter in quantum chromodynamics, which exists at extremely high temperature and/or density.
He led the team from India to participate in the experiments at CERN, Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the USA and at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Germany.
A recipient of Padma Shri in 2001 and the SN Bose Birth Centenary Award of the Indian Science Congress Association in 1994, he was conferred by the West Bengal government the state’s highest award ‘Bangabibhushan’ in 2022 and also the ‘Rabindra Smriti Puraskar’ in the same year.
Apart from scientific contributions, Bikash Sinha was a regular writer on popular science in Bengali.
