Wednesday Colloquia

The processing, heterostructuring and transforming silk with light

by Prof. Kamal P. Singh (IISER Mohali)

Wednesday, February 26, 2020 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Lecture Theatre ( AG-66 )
TIFR
Description
The spider silk is an excellent protein-based biomaterial that is light weight, elastic yet tougher than steel. In this talk, I will discuss, how we can use short fs pulses to process silk in air with nanoscale precision exploiting its non-linear multiphoton interaction with light. We shall also show our attempts to weld silk with metal, Kevlar and polymers to combine their favourable properties. This allows silk-based novel topological structures and classical ultrasensitive devices, such as radiation-pressure force, outperforming traditional force/torque sensing devices. In the end, I will discuss our recent experiments to transform silk-protein by creating a novel opto-magnetic response at nano-scale that opens door for intriguing quantum application. The short fs-pulses may be the key tool to process other biomaterials for diverse applications.