Timir Datta

Timir Datta is an Indian-American physicist specializing in transition temperature superconductors and a professor of physics in the department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, South Carolina.

Datta grew up in India; his father B.N. Dutt was an eminent sugar-refining engineer. He received a master's degree in theoretical plasma physics from Boston College in 1974 under the direction of Gabor Kalman. Datta also worked at the Jet Propulsion laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, as a pre-doctoral NASA research associate of Robert Somoano. He also collaborated with Carl H. Brans at Loyola University New Orleans on a gravitational problem of frame dragging and worked with John Perdew on the behavior of charge density waves in jellium.

Datta was a NSF post-doctoral fellow with Marvin Silver and studied charge propagation in non-crystalline systems at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. At UNC-CH he continued his theoretical interests and worked on retarded Vander Waals potential with L. H. Ford. Since 1982, he has been on the faculty of the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

He collaborated with several laboratories involved with the early discoveries of high temperature superconductivity, especially the team at NRL, led by Donald U Gubser and Stuart Wolf. This research group at USC was the also first to observe (i) bulk Meissner effect in Tl-copper oxides and thus confirm the discovery by Allen Herman's team at the University of Arkansas of high temperature superconductivity in these compounds. He coined the term "triple digit superconductivity", and his group was the first to observe (ii) fractional quantum hall effect in 3-dimensional carbon.

In a paper with Raphael Tsu he derived the first quantum mechanical wave impedance formula for Schrödinger wave functions. He was also the first to show that Bragg's law of X-ray scattering from crystals is a direct consequence of Euclidean length invariance of the incident wave vector; in fact Max von Laue's three diffraction equations are not independent but related by length conservation.

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