Curriculum Vitae - Physics

Curriculum Vitae
Smarajit Karmakar
Contact Information :
Department of Chemical Physics
The Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot 76100
Israel
E-mail :smarajit.karmakar@weizmann.ac.il
Personal Information :
Permanent add : Kalikapur, Bolpur,
Birbhum, West Bengal 731204, India,
Ph. No. +913463252746
Date of Birth: January 22, 1980.
Sex : Male
Nationality : INDIAN
Educational Qualifications :
Secondary Examination ( 1996)
West Bengal Board of Secondary Education
Marks Obtained : 88%
Higher Secondary Examination ( 1996 - 1998)
West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education
Marks Obtained : 85%
Bachelor of Science, (Physics Major) ( 1998 - 2001)
Department of Physics
Siksha Bhavana, Visva Bharati University.
Santiniketan, India.
Marks Obtained : 83%
Master of Science, (Physics) ( 2001 - 2004)
Centre for Condensed Matter Theory,
Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science.
Bangalore, India
MS Thesis : Liquid to Solid Transition for Hard Sphere
Systems : Density Functional Theory
Thesis Advisor : Prof. Chandan Dasgupta
CGPA :: 7.2 (8.0)
PhD ( 2004 - 2009)
Centre for Condensed Matter Theory,
Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science.
Bangalore 560 012, India.
PhD Thesis : Numerical Studies of Slow Dynamics and Glass
Transition in Model Liquids
Thesis Advisor : Prof. Chandan Dasgupta
Computational Skill :
• Programming Language :: F77, F90, C, Shell Script
• Parallel Programming :: OpenMP, MPI
• System Administration :: Handling Linux Clusters

References
Prof. Chandan Dasgupta
Department of Physics
Indian Institute of Science
Bangalore - 560012, INDIA
Phone: +91 (80) 2293 3278, 2360 3924
Email: cdgupta@physics.iisc.ernet.in
URL: http://www.physics.iisc.ernet.in/~cdgupta
Prof. Sriram Ramaswamy
Department of Physics
Indian Institute of Science
Bangalore - 560012, INDIA
Phone: +91 (80) 2293 3283 or 2360 2698
Email: sriram@physics.iisc.ernet.in
URL: http://www.physics.iisc.ernet.in/~sriram
Prof. Srikanth Sastry
Theoretical Sciences Unit
Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced
Scientific Research
Jakkur Campus
Bangalore - 560064, INDIA
Phone: +91 80 2208 2838/2750
Fax: +91 80 2208 2767/2766
Email: sastry@jncasr.ac.in
URL: http://www.jncasr.ac.in/sastry
Prof. Itamar Procaccia
Department of Chemical Physics
The Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot 76100
Israel
e-mail: Itamar.Procaccia@weizmann.ac.il
Dept. FAX: ++972 (8) 934-4123
Voice: ++972 (8) 934-3918 ( Dept. secretary)
++972 (8) 934-4051 (Office)
URL: http://www.weizmann.ac.il/chemphys/cfprocac/
List of Publications :
1. Equilibrium Glassy Phase in a Polydisperse Hard-Sphere System - Pinaki Chaudhuri,
Smarajit Karmakar, Chandan Dasgupta, H.R. Krishnamurthy, and A.K.Sood - Phys. Rev.
Lett. 95, 248301 (2005).
2. Signatures of Dynamical Heterogeneity in the Structure of Glassy Free-energy Minima -
Pinaki Chaudhuri, Smarajit Karmakar and Chandan Dasgupta, Phys. Rev. Lett. 100,
125701 (2008).
3. Growing length and time scales in glass forming liquids - Smarajit Karmakar, Chandan
Dasgupta, and Srikanth Sastry, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. (USA) 106, 3675 (2009).
4. Size of Plastic Events in Strained Amorphous Solids at Finite Temperatures - H.G.E.
Hentschel, Smarajit Karmakar, Edan Lerner, Itamar Procaccia, Phys. Rev. Lett., 104,
025501 (2010).
5. Predicting plastic flow events in athermal shear-strained amorphous solids - Smarajit
Karmakar, Anael Lemaitre, Edan Lerner and Itamar Procaccia, Phys. Rev. Lett., 104,
215502 (2010).
6. Analysis of dynamic heterogeneity in a glass former from the spatial correlations of
mobility - Smarajit Karmakar, Chandan Dasgupta, Srikanth Sastry, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105,
015701 (2010).
7. Comment on “Scaling Analysis of Dynamic ..... Liquid” by Stein and Andersen - Smarajit
Karmakar, Chandan Dasgupta, Srikanth Sastry, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 019801 (2010).
8. Plasticity-Induced Anisotropy in Amorphous Solids: the Bauschinger Effect - Smarajit
Karmakar, Edan Lerner, Itamar Procaccia, arXiv:0910.4281 (will appear in Phys. Rev. E. ).

9. Athermal Nonlinear Elastic Constants of Amorphous Solids - Smarajit Karmakar, Edan
Lerner, and Itamar Procaccia, arXiv: 1004.2198 ( will appear in Phys. Rev. E ) .
10. Time Scales in the Theory of Elasto-Plasticity of Amorphous Solids - Laurent Boue, Peter
Harrowell, Smarajit Karmakar, Edan Lerner, Itamar Procaccia, Ido Regev, Jacques Zylberg
- arXiv:0911.4646 (submitted to Euro. Phys. Lett. ).
11. Statistical Physics of Elasto-Plastic Steady States in Amorphous Solids: Finite
Temperatures and Strain Rates - Smarajit Karmakar, Edan Lerner, Itamar Procaccia,
Jacques Zylberg – arXiv:1006.3737 ( submitted to Phys. Rev. E ).
12. Finite Size Scaling Analysis of beta-relaxation regime and its connection to dynamic
heterogeneity in a glass former - Smarajit Karmakar, Sumilan Banerjee, Pranabjyoti
Bhuyan, Chandan Dasgupta, and Srikanth Sastry (manuscript under preparation) .
13. Finite Size Scaling Analysis of Four-point Susceptibility of Glass-forming Kob-Anderson
Binary Mixture - Smarajit Karmakar, Chandan Dasgupta, Srikanth Sastry (manuscript
under preparation).
14. Finite Size Scaling Analysis of Kob-Anderson Binary Mixture in 2D - Shiladitya Sengupta,
Smarajit Karmakar, Chandan Dasgupta, Srikanth Sastry (manuscript under preparation).
Prizes:
• Top Rank in Bachelor of Science and Master of Science
• Kumari L. A. Meera Memorial Award for the year 2003 − 2004 in recognition of being the
best Integrated PhD Student in Physical Sciences, IISc, Bangalore, India.
• National Eligibility Test (NET) – 2004
• Recipient of Prestigious Dean's Fellowship, Weizmann Institute of Science – 2010 -
2012.
Schools and Conferences Attended :
• SERC School on Statistical Physics - TIFR, Mumbai, INDIA, 16 th to 28 th February 2004
• Conference and School on UNIFYING CONCEPTS IN GLASS PHYSICS III STATPHYS -
22nd Satellite Meeting
School :: 25-26 June 2004, Conference: 28 th June - 1 st July 2004
Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore
• STATPHYS22 - 22nd International Conference on Statistical Physics - IISc, Bangalore,
INDIA July 4 th to 9 th , 2004
• Advanced Graduate School in Statistical and Condensed Matter Physics - Dept. of
Physics, IISc Bangalore, INDIA, January to April 2005
• School on Understanding Molecular Simulations - Centre for Computational Materials
Science, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore 560064, INDIA
22 nd to 27 th January, 2007

• Dynamical heterogeneities in glasses, colloids and granular media
Lorentz Center of Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
August 31 th until September 6 th , 2008
• School on Glass Formers and Glasses - Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific
Research, Bangalore, India, 4 th to 20 th January, 2010.
• COST Strategic Workshop on "Physics of Amorphous Solids:Mechanical Properties and
Plasticity" on 14 th to 19 th March 2010, in Les Houches (France).
Research Experience :
• Density Functional Theory : liquid to crystal transition and glass
transition in simple liquids
we have applied density functional theory to study phase transitions in different hard sphere systems. We
have studied hard sphere systems as the model liquid and the free energy of the system is calculated using
the Ramkrishnan-Yussouff free energy functional. We have minimized the free energy variationally to locate
the crystalline and glassy local minima. We showed that the width of the local peaks of the time-averaged
density field at a glassy free-energy minimum exhibits large spatial variation, similar to that of the “local
Debye-Waller factor” in simulations of dynamical heterogeneity. Molecular dynamics simulations starting
from a particle configuration generated from the density distribution at a glassy free-energy minimum show
similar spatial heterogeneity in the degree of localization, implying a direct connection between dynamical
heterogeneity and the structure of glassy free energy minima. Results have been communicated in
our second paper. We have also studied the freezing transition of polydisperse hard sphere systems. We
have found that the freezing into a crystalline state is not possible beyond a critical polydispersity. The
calculated critical polydispersity turns out to be s ~ 0.05, which is qualitatively in agreement with
experimental findings. We have also found a reentrant transition in the polydisperse hard sphere system.
For a given value of the polydispersity, the system first freezes into a crystalline phase as the density is
increased, but if the density is increased further, crystalline phase become unstable and the system goes
through another transition to a phase which we believe is glassy. This result has been already published in
PRL. In this study, I have used the liquid state theory to calculate the direct correlation functions and
implemented the Lubachevsky-Stillinger algorithm to generate dense random packing for hard sphere
systems; these have been used as initial configurations for the free energy minimization of the glassy state.
This variational minimization has been done for a very large number (~ 2500) of variables to map out the
detailed density distribution of the glassy free energy minimum
• Finite Size Scaling for the Glass Transition
We have used finite size scaling analysis, similar to that used on studies of critical phenomena near
continuous phase transition, to extract a growing correlation length in glassy system. Finite size scaling is
an universally accepted method in critical phenomena for extracting the underlying correlation length. Our
analysis is based on the finite-size behaviour of a four-point dynamical susceptibility 4(t). We found that
although the peak height of 4(t) shows normal finite-size scaling behaviour, the dependence of relaxation
time on the system size is not consistent with it. We have shown that the unusual behaviour of relaxation
time as function of system size can be explained using the Adam-Gibbs relation. Thus our study indicates
that the energy landscape of the super cooled liquid has a strong influence on the dynamics even above the
Mode Coupling temperature. The correlation length, extracted from the scaling analysis, indeed grows with
decreasing temperature, but it doesn’t exhibit the power law divergence at the Mode Coupling temperature
predicted by the Mode Coupling theory. Our data can be better interpreted by the Random First Order
Transition Theory or the Mosaic Theory, which describes the glass transition as an entropically driven
transition relating configurational entropy with dynamics. We are checking the validity of different aspect of
this mosaic theory by doing intensive molecular dynamics simulation for a wide range of temperature and in
different dimensions. In this study, I have done intensive molecular dynamics simulation and also
parallelized the code using MPI library to do some large system size simulation. In configurational entropy
calculation, thermodynamic integration method has been used to calculate the bulk entropy. Inherent
structures have been obtained by doing conjugate gradient minimization from which we have extracted the
basin entropy by diagonalising the Hessian matrix. The difference of bulk entropy and basin entropy is

defined as the configurational entropy.
• Mechanical Properties of Amorphous Solids
Linear elasticity in amorphous systems is a relatively well-understood problem, questions like how does
the disorder influence the approximations to elastic constants and what are the required corrections to the
Born-Huang theory have been dealt with thoroughly in the past. On the other hand, plasticity in amorphous
solids is very poorly understood. In crystalline materials it is generally accepted that the microstructural
objects which govern deformation and flow are a class of topological defects known as dislocations. Most
work in the field of crystalline plasticity focuses on describing deformation in terms of the underlying
dislocation dynamics. In the case of noncrystalline systems the situation is not so clear, even though a broad
category of systems - including metallic glasses, clays and soils, pastes, foams, gels, and other so-called
'soft'' materials' -- seem to share remarkable similarities. In the past several decades much work regarding
the underlying microscopic processes of amorphous plastic flow, has left many unanswered questions and
much controversy. Perhaps the most important of these questions is whether or not there exist some sort of
microstructural defects in the materials which, roughly speaking, play the role of the dislocations in
crystals. There are some recent phenomenological theories which tried to address these questions, Shear
Transformation Zone theory of Langer et al is by far the most impressive theory among them. But there also
its not very clear what controls the plastic yielding. The order parameter proposed in that theory is
extremely difficult to calculate if not impossible. In our recent studies on mechanical properties of
amorphous solids we proposed an order parameter which can in some sense be equivalent to the order
parameter proposed in the STZ theory. But a complete theory is still lacking. We also tried to find out
whether one can predict the plastic failure based on the linear and non-linear elasticity at some strain value.
We found out that one can in principle predict the plastic failure if one has enough information about few
higher order non-linear elastic coefficients.