Research

Our research is primarily on understanding excited state phenomena in molecules. In electronic excited states, unlike in the ground state, the chemistry is largely governed by the crossing of potential energy surfaces or more generally by the coupling of multiple electronic states via nuclear motion. There is a breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Using theoretical methods like multi-reference electronic structure calculations and mixed-quantum classical nuclear dynamics we are interested in mechanistic description of the chemistry in these situations. Here are some questions were are currently investigating.

Every student in the group independently comes up with his or her research question and works on answering it. Anirban's role is of a facilitator. Besides our involvement with excited state chemistry, we collaborate with several experimental, biophysics, and bio-statistics groups. Moreover, we have a strong interest in chemical education and use the classroom as a research lab for exploring more effective ways for teaching and learning chemistry.