Deepak Dhar: Dirac medallist explains sandpile model and return to India

Theoretical physicist Deepak Dhar, a recent winner of the prestigious Dirac Medal, has spoken about his journey from studying under Richard Feynman at Caltech to working in India. In an interview, Dhar shared that he returned to India for a post-doctoral position at TIFR after failing to secure one in the US.

Dhar explained his work on the Abelian sandpile model, which shows how adding a single grain of sand to a pile can sometimes trigger nothing and at other times cause a large avalanche. His breakthrough was mathematically proving that addition operators in the model could predict this sporadic, burst-like behaviour, which had previously only been shown through computer simulations.

On the differences between PhD programmes in the US and India, Dhar said the best US universities are superior to the best in India, but several Indian institutes are comparable to institutions among the top 50 in the US. He credited his father's encouragement and a British science magazine for sparking his interest in science as a child.