Research Overview

How the lab's research topics connect

The Femtosecond Laser Lab at IIT Kanpur studies light-matter interaction on femtosecond timescales under the direction of Prof. Debabrata Goswami.

The lab’s research falls into five connected topics:

• Coherent control: shaped femtosecond pulses steer molecular dynamics, for example by restricting intramolecular vibrational relaxation.
• Quantum computing: phase-modulated pulses drive molecular states as optical qubits, with decoherence as the central obstacle.
• Spatiotemporal control: femtosecond optical tweezers trap and steer colloidal particles while retaining temporal control.
• Thermal effects and sensing: femtosecond thermal lens spectroscopy and tweezers-based nanothermometry probe molecular and thermal properties.
• Two-photon spectroscopy and microscopy: two-photon absorption and fluorescence measure cross-sections, solvent effects and molecular environments.

The femtosecond pulse shaper links these topics. It converts between time and frequency domains, so the same instrument provides frequency selectivity in spectroscopy, spatially resolved nonlinear excitation in microscopy, and temporal profiles for control. The foundations are reviewed in Optical Pulse Shaping Approaches to Coherent Control, Physics Reports (2003), doi:10/fwwrc5.

For all papers, see the publications page.