Statistical Physics of Fracture, Beakdown and Earthquake – Effects of Disorder and Heterogeneity

Soumyajyoti Biswas got his PhD in 2015 for works carried out at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai until March 2015. Presently he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo. Purusattam Ray is professor in Physics at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSC), Chennai and an adjunct professor of Homi Bhabha National Institute (HBNI), Mumbai. He received his Ph.D. from Calcutta University in 1989. He was then SERC research fellow at the University of Manchester, England and subsequently Max Planck fellow at the MPI for Polymer Studies in Mainz and at the University of Mainz, Germany. He has made major contributions in the study of statistical physics of fracture. He annually organizes the International workshop on fracture and breakdown processes. Bikas K. Chakrabarti is a senior professor of theoretical condensed matter physics at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Kolkata, and a visiting professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. He received his doctorate in physics from Calcutta University in 1979 (for research at SINP). Following postdoctoral positions at Oxford University and Cologne University, he joined SINP in 1983. His main research interests include physics of fracture, quantum glasses, etc., and the interdisciplinary sciences of optimization, brain modeling, and econophysics. He has written several books and reviews on these topics.