Research interests
Excited electronic states in molecules and materials are important because these states have energies comparable to activation barriers associated with most chemical reactions. However, even today, such chemistries remain underutilized because of experimental difficulties in resolving atom- or site-specific excited state dynamics. The challenges are substantial – for one, excited electronic states are often delocalized over multiple atoms making site-specific changes amenable to only theoretical methods; two, the changes proceed on extremely fast time scales that require femtosecond time resolution; and last but not the least, ‘coherent artifacts’ in most ultrafast spectroscopies fuzz out the ‘time-zero’, rendering the critical Franck-Condon region intractable. Research in the Bhattacherjee Lab aims to develop ultrafast core-level spectroscopy to utilize the full potential of excited-state photochemical reactions for applications in energy and catalysis.
