Sir C.V. Raman's 1930 Nobel Prize and the Discovery of the Raman Effect
Indian physicist C.V. Raman won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the Raman effect, which describes how light changes wavelength when scattering through transparent substances.
Newsnibs Staff
- 2026-10-12
- Updated 5:38 AM UTC
(Calcutta, India)
Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, an Indian physicist, discovered that light changes wavelength when it scatters through transparent substances, a finding that revealed details of molecular structure and became known as the Raman effect. He made the discovery on February 28, 1928, in a laboratory in Calcutta, working with his collaborator K.S. Krishnan. Two years later, in 1930, Raman won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the work, becoming the first Asian and the first non-white recipient of the prize.
Raman traced his interest in the problem to 1921, when he was struck by the blue color of the Mediterranean Sea and questioned the standard explanation that the water was merely reflecting the sky. That question led him and Krishnan to study how light scatters when it passes through transparent materials. They found that some of the scattered light emerges at a different wavelength than the light that went in, a shift caused by the way molecules absorb and release energy. The effect gave physicists and chemists a new way to probe the structure of molecules by analyzing the light they scatter.
Raman was born in 1888 in British India and showed early aptitude for science, passing his BA at age 15. He spent years in a government finance job before leaving it in 1917 to become the Palit Professor of Physics at the University of Calcutta, a move that let him pursue research full time. He was knighted in 1929, the year before his Nobel win.
The technique that grew out of his discovery, Raman spectroscopy, is now used by chemists, materials scientists and pharmaceutical researchers around the world to identify chemical compounds and study molecular structures. Raman went on to found the Raman Research Institute and received India's highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1954. He died in 1970.
India marks the anniversary of his discovery each year on February 28 as National Science Day.
Photo by Europeana on Unsplash
