Ashoke Sen is a renowned professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bengaluru, and an Indian theoretical physicist. He was born in 1956. He is also an honorary fellow at the National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER), Bhubaneswar, India, as well as a distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study and a Morningstar Visiting Professor at MIT. String theory is the focus of his research. For paving the way for the revelation that all string theories are just various limitations of the same fundamental theory, he was one of the first recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize.
Contribution to Science
With his seminal publication on strong-weak coupling duality, often known as S-duality, Prof. Ashoke Sen made a number of significant unique contributions to the field of string theory. He was a pioneer in the research of unstable D-branes and is credited with formulating the well-known Sen hypothesis regarding open string tachyon condensation on such branes. In string cosmology, his depiction of rolling tachyons has had a significant impact. The development of the entropy function formalism, which aids in providing a statistical interpretation of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of black holes in terms of the degeneracy count of microscopic states in String Theory, is another significant contribution. In order to connect the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of black holes to the degeneracy count of states in the related String Theory, he developed the Entropy Function Formalism.
Current Work
The attractor mechanism and the accurate counting of black hole microstates are the focus of Prof. Sen’s current research. String Theory is his primary area of expertise. For “opening the route to the insight that all string theories are distinct limitations of the same fundamental theory,” he was one of the inaugural recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize. The Russian billionaire Yuri Milner established this award to recognise achievements in science. Additionally, he has co-authored numerous significant papers on string field theory.
