Date and Time: 02 September 2026 & 2:00 PM
Venue: SV Narasaiah Auditorium, IAP Department
Title: Chiral Photonics Enabled by Biological Building Blocks
Abstract for the talk:
Chirality, a fundamental structural property, is present across multiple length scales, from molecular amino acids to macroscopic helical structures. Harnessing and controlling chirality at the nanoscale opens new possibilities in spintronics, quantum computing, enantioselective catalysis, and biomolecular sensing. My research focuses on designing 3D chiral nanostructures by integrating the electronic properties of metals with the structural chirality of amino acids. By inducing chirality in traditionally non-chiral materials such as semiconductors, metals, and dielectrics, novel optically active materials with enhanced functionalities have been developed, enabling advancements in machine vision and biosensing. A key breakthrough of my work is the scalable synthesis of enantiomeric helical nanostructures, facilitating industrial-scale production of chiral metamaterials. The hierarchical nature of their structure spanning from nanometer to micrometer length scales, imparts them chiral photonic fingerprints from UV-vis, IR to THz spectral regions. I will demonstrate how large scale synthesis and multi-spectral response enable the utilization of these materials as fiducial markers for LiDAR sensing.
About the speaker:
Prashant Kumar is a Nanyang Assistant Professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research spans materials characterization, colloidal chemistry, and diagnostics, with a focus on electron microscopy to visualize soft matter dynamics. His group leverages chirality to bridge organic-inorganic materials with biological matter, enabling detection of viruses, proteins, and amino acids. This work is supported by the prestigious NRF Fellowship of Singapore, awarded to ~13 young investigators annually. He holds a B.S./M.S. in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering from IIT Madras (2012) and a Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Minnesota, where he specialized in transmission electron microscopy of soft porous materials. His postdoctoral work at the University of Michigan expanded into colloidal chemistry, resulting in quantum dots capable of self-assembling into chiral meta structures. Outside the lab, he practices yoga and weightlifting.
Refreshments will be provided after the seminar talk.
ALL ARE WELCOME.