Dr. Arijit Kumar De

My PhD research (pursued at IIT Kanpur, India; Supervisor: Prof Debabrata Goswami) involved application of (ultrafast) time-domain control schemes in spatially resolved studies, i.e. in (confocal and two-photon) fluorescence microscopy and optical tweezers; this work is promised to gain simultaneous space-/time-resolved insight to studies and control of molecular dynamics.

My Postdoctoral research (pursued at U C Berkeley, USA; Supervisor: Prof Graham R Fleming) involves extending ultrafast nonlinear (multi-dimensional) spectroscopy to few-molecule (and possibly, single-molecule) level sensitivity.

At present, my research group at IISER Mohali, India is working along two major directions:

1) to study (and, hopefully, control!) coherent energy/charge transfer dynamics within natural light harvesters (for example, photosynthetic pigment-protein complexes, fluorescent proteins) as well as within their artificial analogs (for example, molecular aggregates, photovoltaic materials) both at the bulk/ensemble level using femtosecond pump-probe and two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy which are supported by theory.

2) to understand nano-scale optical forces using femtosecond laser tweezers for which we have developed analytic theories including nonlinear optical effects to estimate force/potential with numerical simulation.