Sourav Pal

Who is Sourav Pal?

Sourav Pal is one of the pioneers in the area of quantum chemistry. Pal is director of National Chemical Laboratory, and adjunct professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, both in Pune.

He is one of the leaders in the response properties using coupled cluster based methods. His major scientific accomplishments include rigorous development of expectation value as well as extended coupled-cluster functional retaining size-extensivity of analytic properties, pioneering development of the response properties to multi-reference coupled cluster theory, important applications of the theory to spectra, study of the effect of electron correlation and role of exchange effects on the low energy electron molecule scattering, introduction of complex scaling and complex absorbing potential in MRCC theory to calculate electron-atom and electron-molecule resonances accurately. He has developed a non-iterative approximation to coupled-perturbed Kohn-Sham density functional theoretic equations for calculation of non-linear properties, which is implemented in the developers’ version of deMon code.

Dr. Sourav Pal has also made significant contributions in the area of reactivity descriptors highlighting the conditions of validity of the principle of maximum hardness, deriving qualitative relation of hardness with polarizability, establishing Hirshfeld population in calculation of condensed Fukui functions and developing local hard-soft-acid-base principle for molecular recognition. Further, among his major scientific contributions is study of anti-aromaticity in metal clusters using ab initio molecular dynamics study of structure, electron localisation function and magnetic ring currents. He has addressed the incorporation of Sn-into Beta Zeolites theoretically using AIMD and is actively engaged in computational study of hydrogen storage properties of materials.