Brief biodata

Prof. N. Das obtained her M. Sc. in Physics from Gauhati University and Ph.D. from CPP-IPR, under Gauhati University. She was also a Postdoctoral fellow at University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her research interest involve Theory and simulation of Plasma Physics, in particular, dusty plasma, strongly coupled dusty plasma, behaviour of dust crystal in presence of magnetic field, plasma waves etc. She has been a faculty member of the department of physics since 1998.

Research

DUSTY PLASMA : Two omnipresent ingredients in the universe are plasmas and charged dust. The interplay between these two has opened up a new and fascinating research area, that is of dusty plasma, which are ubiquitous in different parts of our solar system, namely planetary rings, circumsolar dust rings, the interplanetary medium, cometary tails, as well as interstellar molecular clouds etc. Dusty plasmas also occur in microelectronic processing devices, in low-temperature laboratory discharges, and in tokamaks.

LASER-PLASMA INTERACTION: The interaction of high power laser with plasma gives rise to bundle of exotic phenomena. Due to rapid progress in ultra high intensity lasers over last decades, based on the invention of chirped pulse amplification (CPA) and advanced femtosecond techniques, it has become possible to drive electrons with relativistic energy opening new areas of relativistic nonlinear optics and plasma physics. The understanding of relativistic laser-plasma interaction is basic to many applications, including optical field ionized x-ray lasers, plasma based electron accelerator schemes. Improvement of laser duration to 10 fs from tens of picoseconds has made it possible to study phenomena which were otherwise too fast to be observed by old lasers.

Selected List of Publications

• Biswajit Dutta, Pratikshya Bezbaruah and Nilakshi Das, Magnetized wake driven anomalous diffusion in complex plasma, Physics of Plasmas, 28,083703 (2021)
• Ankita Bhagawati and Nilakshi Das, Laser-accelerated protons using density gradients in hydrogen plasma spheres, Journal of Plasma physics, 87,905870413 (2021)
• Hans Schamel, Nilakshi Das and Prathana Borah, The privileged spectrum of cnoidal ion holes and its extension by imperfect ion trapping, Physics Letters A, 382,168-174 (2018)
• Pratikshya Bezbaruah and Nilakshi Das, Anomalous transport of charged dust grains in a magnetized collisional plasma : A molecular dynamics study, Physics of Plasmas, 25,053708 (2018)
• Deep Kumar Kuri, Nilakshi Das and Kartik Patel, Proton acceleration from magnetized overdense plasmas, Physics of Plasmas, 24,013112 (2017)
• S. Bhattacharjee and N. Das, The linear and non-linear characterization of dust ion acoustic mode in complex plasma in presence of dynamical charging of dust, Physics of Plasmas, 22,103701 (2015)