Biography

Dr. Santanu Bhattacharyya received his Ph.D. (Science) from the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata, in 2013. He was subsequently a postdoctoral scientist in IMDEA Nanociencia, Madrid, and later in 2015, he joined the Chair for Photonics and Optoelectronics, LMU, Munich, as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow. 

After finishing his postdoctoral stay in Germany, he joined as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Sciences, IISER Berhampur, in August 2018. His group mainly focuses on several light-induced processes in fluorescent nanomaterials and the optimization of environmentally sustainable nanomaterials for solar fuel generation.

Research Projects

• Optimizing Luminescent Carbon Dots for Photocatalytic Solar Water Splitting: A Metal Co-Catalyst Free Approach for Solar Fuel Generation: 

  Luminescent Carbon dots (CDs) are a new class of low-cost earth-abundant carbon-based material that raises the interest of modern material research for versatile applicability in imaging, sensing, and emitting devices due to their interesting luminescence properties, stability, aqueous solubility, and complete benign nature. Recent reports have already demonstrated the potentiality of CDs as efficient light harvesters for photocatalysis upon combining with additional co-catalyst. But considering the tuneable optoelectronic properties of carbon dots, it is quite promising to optimize solely the carbon dots both as efficient light harvesters and active catalytic sites. 

  Unfortunately, the current development is in the embryonic stage as there is a substantial gap of fundamental knowledge regarding the structure-property correlations of carbon dots. Very specifically, two points need to be highlighted very precisely i.e. i) Enhancement of free charge carriers by reducing competitive radiative and non-radiative recombination processes, ii) enhancement of solar light absorption by intrinsic structural modifications. Therefore, the major focus of the current project is the tailored designing of carbon-based nanomaterials by means of detail structure-property correlation for efficient solar light harvesting, followed by proper utilization of solar energy for photocatalytic solar water splitting without using any additional metal catalyst (DST SERB-SRG grant)

• Heterojunction Hybrids Made of Self-assembled Donor(D)-Acceptor(A)-Donor(D) Type Organic Nanomaterials @ Fullerene/Non-fullerene Based Acceptors for Photocatalytic Solar to Hydrogen and Chemical Energy Conversions

Key Publications

• Mandal et al ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces   https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.4c03842.
• Kar et al Journal of Materials Chemistry A 10.1039/D3TA07895G
• Mandal et al ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering https://doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.3c03296
• Bishwal et al ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.3c01620
• Kommula et al ACS Applied Nano Materials https://doi.org/10.1021/acsanm.2c03061
• Kar et al Advaned Optical Materials https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.202102641