Then he went to the Cavendish Laboratory on an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship and obtained a second doctorate degree from Cambridge University mainly for his work on the corrections for extinction in neutron and X-ray scattering from crystals.

Chandrasekhar was invited to establish a liquid crystal laboratory in RRI after the Department of Science and Technology started supporting it in 1971.

Along with a couple of former students who moved with him to RRI, in a short time, he developed a laboratory with all the essential facilities needed for research in the chosen area.

Realizing that cutting-edge research would not be possible without an in-house capacity to produce new materials, a synthetic organic chemistry laboratory was set up.

Soon many new experimental and a few theoretical results emerged and the Liquid Crystal Laboratory at RRI became one of the leading centres of research in the world.

In cooperation with Chandrasekhar and his colleagues, the Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), Bangalore, developed indigenous know-how for the manufacture of simple LCDs for the domestic market.

The pinnacle in Chandrasekhar's scientific career came in 1977, when he and his co-workers discovered the columnar phase of liquid crystals made of disc-shaped molecules, rather than the well-studied rods.

After retiring from the RRI in 1990, Chandrasekhar started the Centre for Liquid Crystal Research[6] in a building made available by BEL in Bangalore.

He was also the recipient of the Karnataka Rajyotsava award (1986), Padma Bhushan (1998)[7] and the honour of Knight of the Order of Academic Palms by the French Government (1999).