C.S. Unnikrishnan

C. S. Unnikrishnan is professor of physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, India. His research interests are experimental and theoretical aspects of fundamental issues in gravity and quantum physics, and novel metrology. His early work was in the precision tests of modified gravity and related instrumentation. He was a visiting scientist at the Kastler-Brossel Laboratory, Paris, where he participated in the Bose-Einstein condensation of metastable helium. He set up the laser-cooling laboratory at TIFR, in which the first Bose-condensate in India was produced and studied. Prof. Unnikrishnan's major original contribution is the paradigm of cosmic relativity, a theory of relativity and dynamics based on the factual gravity of the matter in the universe, supported by many experimental results. Recently, he formulated a completion of Hamilton's action mechanics to a universal mechanics, applicable to all scales of matter and dynamics, solving the foundational physical problems of quantum mechanics. Prof. Unnikrishnan is a proposer-member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)-India project and a member of the global LIGO Scientific Collaboration that detected the gravitational waves. His major interests outside physics research are music and films, especially their structure and the process of their creation.