Vasant Natarajan Papers

Vasant Natarajan was an experimental physicist who worked primarily at IISc, Bangalore. Natarajan got his BTech degree in Electronic Engineering from IIT Madras, and then moved to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US, where he obtained his MSc in the same discipline. Natarajan switched to experimental atomic physics, and joined the laboratory of David Pritchard, MIT as a PhD student. He obtained his PhD in 1993, after which he joined Bell Labs. After two years at Bell Labs, he joined IISc as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics in 1996. Natarajan worked in the field of laser cooling and trapping of neutral atoms and his lab had produced a cloud of trapped laser-cooled Rubidium atoms in 2001. His laboratory also worked on high precision frequency metrology and quantum optics experiments employing precision atomic spectroscopy. He also collaborated with biologists on malaria parasite-affected red blood cells. Natarajan was also interested in scientific temper, rationalism and science communication.