Gravity, Cosmology and Raychaudhuri's Equation

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The name Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri (1923-2005), popularly known as AKR among his students, hardly requires any explanation to any Relativist and Cosmologist in India or in abroad. A Kolkata based Physicist, Raychaudhuri was educated in Presidency College and Calcutta University. He worked as a researcher at Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata, and as faculty member at the Departments of Physics of Presidency College and Jadavpur University, Kolkata. 

Among his numerous contributions to the field of Gravitation and Cosmology, certainly the most valuable and acclaimed one is the Raychaudhuri equation, derived in a paper published in 1955 in Physical Review (American Physical Society). This equation chiefly describes how the trajectories of a group of particles moving freely in a gravitational field, converge or diverge. The Raychaudhuri equation has a plethora of applications in gravity, black hole physics as well as in cosmological scenarios to predict the evolution of our universe. In particular without this equation, it would have been impossible to obtain the singularity theorems, later derived by S. Hawking and R. Penrose. The Raychaudhuri equation is also celebrated as a fundamental relationship between matter and spacetime geometry like the Einstein equations of gravitation. 

During his association as an emeritus Professor here, with the Department of Physics at Jadavpur University, Raychaudhuri established the Relativity and Cosmology Research Centre. His chief objective behind this was to promote research in Gravitation and Cosmology at Jadavpur University, as well as to give the local college teachers a platform for research in the same discipline. 

Given that the previous year 2023 was the birth centenary of Raychaudhuri, the members of the Relativity and Cosmology Research Centre of Jadavpur University in association with IUCAA, Pune, wish to commemorate his immense contributions to Physics by organizing a two-day workshop titled “Gravity, Cosmology and Raychaudhuri’s Equation”. This workshop aims to emphasize on the Raychaudhuri equation and its applications to Gravitation and cosmology. There will be invited talks as well as a plenary talk, to be delivered by renowned senior researchers from various institutions of India. Apart from this, local degree college teachers and Research scholars who have recent publications in these or related fields may also register and participate in this workshop and there will be poster session, in order to provide them a platform to present their works in front of leading experts and to interact with them. Post-graduate and highly enthusiastic under-graduate students are also encouraged to take part.