Deepshikha Choudhury Wins National Nuclear Physics Award

Deepshikha Choudhury, a newly minted Ph.D. at Ohio University, Miami, Ohio, won the best dissertation award in her field for 2008. The prestigious award is given by the American Physical Society.

Deepshikha worked under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Philips, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Ohio University. The title of her dissertation is Investigating Neutron Polarizabilities and NN Scattering in Heavy-baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory. The dissertation competition is open to any doctoral student in nuclear physics in North America who has completed a dissertation within the last two years.

Deepshikha’s dissertation developed a new theory to allow measurement of important properties of the neutron, a basic building block of matter. Neutron properties are difficult to determine experimentally, mainly because a neutron is only stable when paired with at least one proton.

Dr. Halyan Gao, Associate Professor of Physics at Duke University will test Choudhury’s theory by blasting high-energy gamma rays at a sample of Helium-3, which contains one neutron and two protons. Information from the gamma-ray-Helium-3 collisions will be used to isolate neutron’s properties.

Deepshikha is currently working as a postdoctoral fellow at George Washington University until August 2009.

Deepskikha is the daughter of Ajit Kumar Choudhury of Dispur. Deepshikha is full of pride in her Assamese roots. She told Posoowa “We are as competitive as the rest of the world and my winning this prize is another evidence of this fact. Assam is no longer a remote state in India and there are a lot of success stories in all walks of life. I always proudly say that I ‘belong’ to Assam”. Assam needs more individuals like Deepshikha to excel in life and career, and bring glory to Assam.

By Jugal Kalita (The photograph is from Ohio University Web site)