Sir C.V. Raman's Birthday

A Special lecture was organized to celebrate Sir C.V. Raman's Birthday on November 12, 2021. Prof. S. Umapathy, FASc, FNASc, FRSC on Director, IISER, Bhopal  spoke on the topic " Laser spectroscopy: From Physics to Chemistry, Biology, and Medicine." The lecture began with how Lasers have become an essential light source in spectroscopic applications due to their inherent coherence and intensity. These properties enable both time (fs) and spatial (nm) resolutions required to study materials at the nanoscopic to the microscopic level and also their dynamics in the femtosecond to seconds time scale. In this talk, Prof. Umapathy presented various applications of laser spectroscopy, particularly vibrational spectroscopy, in physics, biology, and medicine. Understanding molecular movements in the time scales on bond-specific vibrational periods has become the focus of recent research with the hope of understanding physical, chemical, and biological processes in real-time, as in slow motion capture. The third-order non-linear susceptibility response of a system using stimulated Raman scattering processes leads to observing the evolution of vibrational structures in femtosecond time scales. He showed examples of energy migration and coherent oscillation of coupled vibrational modes, which explain how molecules move and how the environment impacts the dynamics. In the case of biology and medicine, we would present results of both infrared and Ramanmicroscopic approaches to studying cell-drug interactions, muscle disorders, neuronal stem cells, sepsis, and lab-on-chip applications. He explained the recently developed approach to imaging molecules/chemicals hidden inside containers and masked by other chemicals or tissues.

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