Nelamangala Vedavyasachar Madhusudana, Indian physicist (Mysore, Karnataka State 09 May 1944 –

Authored over 160 papers

First to demonstrate the electromechanical coupling effects in cholesteric liquid crystals First to demonstrate the suppression induced by curvature in the smectic A phase of the crystals

Elucidated the phenomenon of smectic A phase with tilted molecules caused by off-axis molecular dipoles

Suggested an explanation for the anti-parallel correlations of near-neighborn molecules and apolar direction of highly polar compounds

Demonstrated the impact of flexoelectricity in nematic phase transitions

Discovered many relationships between elastic constants and molecular organizations

Discovered high strength defects in impure nematics

Found unusual growth phenomena in smectic A phase and smectic C liquid crystals

Found spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in some smectic C cylinders

Discovered a new phase undulated twist grain boundary smectic C* with an extreme type in nature

Discovered the biaxial smectic A phase in mixture of bent-core and rod-like molecules and striking stripe structures in such a medium

Discovered an anomalous temperature dependency of elastic constants in the nematic phase of mixtures

Found an unusual “odd-even” effect in the properties of disulphide-bridged dimmers, depending on the chain length of the monomeric moiety 

Showed that quenching of direct fluctuations by electric fields determines the field-induced enhancement of the nematic isotropic transition temperature

With S. Chandrasekhar & P.P. Kant developed a simple and direct method to measure twist elastic constant (1973)

Developed a technique to measuring the local temperature

LINKS

http://www.rri.res.in/htmls/library/imprints_collection/bios/madhusudana.html