Sir C.V. Raman received the Nobel Prize in which field?

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970) was one of India's greatest scientists. He was born on 7 November 1888 in Tiruchirappalli, in present-day Tamil Nadu. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him". He was the first Asian and the first non-white person to win a Nobel Prize in any branch of science.

On 28 February 1928, working at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in Calcutta with his student K.S. Krishnan, Raman discovered that when a beam of light passes through a transparent substance, a small part of the scattered light has a different wavelength (colour) from the incident light. This change is caused by the light exchanging energy with the vibrating molecules of the substance. This phenomenon is called the Raman effect, and the resulting spectrum is the Raman spectrum. Raman spectroscopy is now widely used to identify chemical substances, study molecular structure, detect drugs and explosives, and analyse materials.

Because of this discovery, 28 February is celebrated in India every year as National Science Day, since 1987.

Raman also studied the acoustics of musical instruments, such as the violin and Indian drums like the tabla and mridangam, and explained why the sea appears blue (by the scattering of light by water molecules). He became the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, in 1933, and founded the Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru in 1948. He received the Bharat Ratna in 1954 and the Lenin Peace Prize in 1957. His nephew, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983.

Why not the other options?

• ✗Chemistry: Indian-origin winners include Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (2009).
• ✗Medicine: Har Gobind Khorana (1968) was an Indian-origin winner.
• ✗Literature: Rabindranath Tagore won in 1913, the first Indian Nobel laureate.