Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman and Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan jointly reported the effect in 1928. Their letter describes light from the Sun concentrated by an -aperture, -focal length telescope objective and a second optical lens onto a liquid purified by repeated vacuum distillation. With blue-violet and yellow-green optical filters together in the incident beam, the visible track disappeared; moving the yellow-green optical filter between liquid and observer restored it. The complementary arrangement rejected unchanged-colour scattering of light while admitting newly generated light. Persistence after purification and strong wave polarization in many liquids argued against ordinary fluorescent contamination.[ref]
In his 1930 lecture, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman describes a cobalt-glass optical filter selecting indigo-violet light from the Sun, with a separated blue-green band in the scattered optical spectrum. Substituting a quartz mercury arc and condenser gave sharp new spectral lines. Small Hilger quartz spectrographs recorded them photographically; Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan obtained more precise records with a larger instrument and established violet-displaced lines. The optical prism disperses wavelengths for spatial readout; it does not create the Raman shift. The diagram gives functional optical paths rather than a reconstruction of a specific Hilger instrument.[ref]
The Molecular Scattering of Light by Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. Nobel Lectures, Physics 1922–1941; Raman, The molecular scattering of light, Nobel lecture, 11 December 1930, printed pp. 271–273, spectroscopic examination and photographic recording; inspected in a reproduction of the complete lecture
Complementary optical filters and a dispersive readout test different parts of the Raman scattering evidence
. Original functional schematic of the filter test and later spectral test. Side collection is unfolded for readability. The optical prism, spectrograph slit and photographic plate indicate dispersion and recording; the sketch supplies no historical distances, exact optical prescription or measured colour intensities. Source. Details.Their May 1928 report strengthens the comparison: filtered mercury illumination of toluene produced extra spectral lines. Removing the incident line removed its associated longer-wavelength group; a quinine filter removing the , and group removed a different shifted group while preserving the one associated with . These are actual selective-excitation controls, rather than inferred colours.[ref]
The Optical Analogue of the Compton Effect by Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman and Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan. Raman and Krishnan, The Optical Analogue of the Compton Effect, Nature 121, p. 711, Fig. 1 description and removal of individual incident-line groups
The inference has limits. A complementary-filter test alone establishes newly admitted wavelengths, not their precise spacing or a unique microscopic mechanism. Fluorescence can also survive purification when intrinsic to the liquid, and fluorescence can be polarized. Useful distinctions therefore combine resolved spectral lines, excitation dependence, wave polarization and sample preparation. A proposed modern extension is to change a single incident frequency: a molecular Raman shift should follow the same internal energy gap, whereas ordinary relaxed molecular fluorescence usually retains approximately its emission-band positions. This is a diagnostic under stated conditions, not a universal theorem about every fluorescent material or resonant scattering process. Raman scattering need not involve a populated, relaxed electronic excited state as ordinary molecular fluorescence does; neither a redder photon nor the word Stokes identifies the mechanism by itself.
The 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman alone for his work on scattering of light and the discovery of the effect. That award allocation should be distinguished from the joint experimental report with Kariamanikkam Srinivasa Krishnan.[ref]
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1930 by Nobel Foundation. Nobel Foundation prize record: sole laureate and award motivation, Physics 1930
