Bala Iyer

Prof. Bala R. Iyer (28th December 1952) was Chairman, Theoretical Physics Group for two terms and retired as Senior Professor from Raman Research Institute.
Prof. Iyer was born to Sri N. Ramakrishnan and Smt. Parvathy Ramakrishnan on 28th December 1952 at Parli, Kerala. He had his early education at Kalyan. He obtained B.Sc in 1973 from Ramnarain Ruia College and M.Sc. degree from Bombay University in 1976. He obtained Ph.D from Bombay University in 1980.
During his formative years for a decade he worked on issues related to perturbations in classical GR and problems in GR with potential astrophysical implications. Since 1989, he has been involved in high accuracy post-Newtonian computations of gravitational waves from inspiralling compact binaries made of neutron stars and black holes. These form the starting point for construction of high accuracy templates for interferometric GW detectors like LIGO and Virgo and also the limit to validate the early inspiral phase of numerical relativity waveforms of late inspiral and merger. He worked on construction of PN template families and their extensions using resummation methods like Pade approximants. Over the years, along with Phd students he worked on extensions to GW from compact binaries in elliptical orbits. They also worked on implications for parameter estimation and test of gravity using GW observations. Since 2009 as Chair of IndIGO Consortium, Iyer was involved in proposals to extend the global network of GW detectors to realize GW astronomy in the coming decade. In 2011, this led to the LIGO-India proposal, a Mega-Project on Indian Soil in collaboration with LIGO, USA and its international partners, Australia, Germany and U.K. Currently, LIGO-India is in its final stages of consideration by the Indian government.