Bikas Chakrabarti


Bikas Kanta Chakrabarti is an Indian physicist. At present he is INSA Scientist at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics & visiting professor at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India.

Biography

Chakrabarti received his Ph.D. degree from Calcutta University in 1979. Following post-doctoral work at the University of Oxford and the University of Cologne, he joined the faculty of Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in 1983. He is S. S. Bhatnagar Prize awardee and former J. C. Bose National Fellow. He is a former director of SINP. At present he is INSA Scientist at SINP and also Honorary Visiting Professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute. Emeritus Professor of SINP and of S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences. Much of Chakrabarti's research has centered around statistical condensed matter physics and applications to social sciences.

Honors, awards & recognitions

Awards and fellowships

Quantum annealing

  • "Idea of quantum annealing”... due to "tunnelling through infinitely high classical barriers separating infinitely many metastable states was indeed put forward even earlier, in ,...", write Erio Tosatti et al. in their Topical Review
  • "The phenomenon of quantum tunneling suggests that it can be more efficient to explore the state space quantum mechanically in a quantum annealer ", write Sergio Boixo, Daniel Lidar, John M. Martinis, Matthias Troyer, et al.
  • "Quantum annealing uses quantum tunneling instead of thermal excitations to escape from local minima..." , write Matthias Troyer et al.
  • "Quantum annealing... is a technique inspired by classical simulated annealing that aims to take advantage of quantum tunnelling.", write Sergio Boixo, Hartmut Neven et al.
  • "Quantum annealing aims at finding low-energy configurations... by a controlled quantum adiabatic evolution... to escape local minima through multiple tunneling events " ... It can "lead to extremely powerful alternative computational devices”, write Riccardo Zecchina et al.
  • "This agrees with the intuition that a Stoquastic Adiabatic Quantum Computation advantage over Simulated Annealing is associated with tall and thin barriers .", write Daniel Lidar et al.
  • “Earliest work in laying foundation of quantum annealing was done in 1989 , showing that quantum fluctuations can increase the ergodicity in a spin-glass model, by tunneling between 'trapping' minima, separated by narrow potential barriers.... Das & Chakrabarti gives... clear picture of fundamental physical properties and mechanism.”, write Helmut Ritsch et al.
  • “Adiabatic quantum computation ” ...“has attracted intense interest owing to its potential speedup over classical algorithms”, write Frank Wilczek et al.
  • "Quantum annealing and other inspired methods have garnered increasing interest because of their quantum attributes that could offer potential solutions to the challenges inherent in combinatorial optimization problems ... D-wave systems ... utilize superconducting quantum interferometers to execute quantum annealing...", write Yoshihisa Yamamoto (scientist) et al.
  • "Adiabatic algorithms : This is a heuristic algorithm based on physical insight which often works well but for which no convergence guarantees exist", write Ignacio Cirac et al., in their perspective review on Second Quantum Revolution: Quantum Computing & Information
  • "Indeed, it has been established that quantum annealing shows convergence to the optimal state with larger probability than simulated annealing in a variety of cases if the same annealing schedule is used . The intuition for the enhanced performance is that quantum fluctuations allow for tunneling events through particularly spiky peaks of the energy landscape , which in contrast are not possible when using classical simulated annealing.", write Subir Sachdev et al.
  • "The idea of quantum annealing traces its origins from the pioneering works in , where quantum fluctuations have been introduced into the simulated annealing process with the aim to converge to the global minimum quicker than classical simulated annealing ; Albash & Lidar, Rev. Mod. Phys. .", write Sougato Bose et al.

    Econophysics

  • "Influential" & "Elegant" papers from "Kolkata School" on “Statistical mechanics of money, wealth & income”, write Physicist Victor Yakovenko & Economist J. Barkley Rosser Jr.
  • See Wikipedia entry on Kinetic exchange models of markets for contributions in modelling the income and wealth distributions
  • “Fathers of Econophysics", Thesis by C. Schinckus, Dept. History and Philosophy of Science, Univ. Cambridge
  • "A number of disciplines have wholeheartedly embraced mathematical tools and models from physics... For example, the physicist Bikas Chakrabarti has applied the kinetic theory of gas to models of markets... His is not a one-off example; the list... includes luminaries such as Jan Tinbergen, the first ever recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics.", write Mariza Uzunova Dang et al., in their Oxford IB book on Theory of Knowledge
  • "Historic conference in Kolkata ": One of the six major events in the last hundred and twenty years of physics applications "in economics and finance... appearance of the doctoral dissertation by Louis Bachelier in 1900", Econophysics spl. issue editorial by H. Eugene Stanley et al.
  • "Foundational papers”, Topical Review on ‘Twenty-five years of Kinetic exchange models of markets’ by M. Greenberg & H. Oliver Gao
  • Kolkata Game: See Wikipedia entry on Kolkata Paise Restaurant Problem for game theoretic modelling of decentralized social optimizations.
  • “Econophysics: An Introduction ” has been the only suggested Textbook for the Econophysics course, offered for last one & half a decade by the Leiden University physics dept.. Course offer started in 2012-2013 & is continuing up to the present academic year 2025-2026.

    Books

  • Quantum Ising Phases and Transitions in Transverse Ising Models, Bikas K. Chakrabarti, Amit Dutta and Parongama Sen, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg
  • Statistical Physics of Fracture and Breakdown in Disordered Solids, Bikas K. Chakrabarti and L. Gilles Benguigui, Oxford University Press, Oxford
  • Econophysics: An Introduction, Sitabhra Sinha, Arnab Chatterjee, Anirban Chakraborti and Bikas K. Chakrabarti, Wiley-VCH, Berlin
  • Econophysics of Income & Wealth Distributions, Bikas K. Chakrabarti, Anirban Chakraborti, Satya R. Chakravarty and Arnab Chatterjee, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
  • Sociophysics: An Introduction, Parongama Sen and Bikas K. Chakrabarti, Oxford University Press, Oxford
  • Quantum Phase Transitions in Transverse Field Spin Models: From Statistical Physics to Quantum Information, Amit Dutta, Gabriel Aeppli, Bikas K. Chakrabarti, Uma Divakaran, Thomas Felix Rosenbaum & Diptiman Sen, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
  • Quantum Spin Glasses, Annealing and Computation, Shu Tanaka, Ryo Tamura & Bikas K. Chakrabarti, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Reviews

  • B. K. Chakrabarti and M. Acharyya, Dynamic Transitions and Hysteresis, Rev. Mod. Phys. 71, 847
  • A. Das and B. K. Chakrabarti, Quantum Annealing and Analog Quantum Computations, Rev. Mod. Phys. 80, 1061
  • S. Pradhan, A. Hansen, and B. K. Chakrabarti, Failure Processes in Elastic Fiber Bundles, Rev. Mod. Phys. 82, 499.
  • H. Kawamura, T. Hatano, N. Kato, S. Biswas, and B. K. Chakrabarti, Statistical Physics of Fracture, Friction, and Earthquakes, Rev. Mod. Phys. 84, 839.
  • A. Rajak, S. Suzuki, A. Dutta and B. K. Chakrabarti, Quantum Annealing: An Overview, Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. A, 381, 20210417.