About the lab
SRM University AP
We build optical materials as if the supply chain were part of the design.
The Sustainable Photonic Materials Lab sits at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, SRM University AP, in Amaravati. We synthesise fluorescent carbon-based materials and shape them into micro-resonators, gain media, encoding particles and transparent films for lighting, sensing, security and thermal management.
Why sustainable
Four rules the lab holds itself to.
Sustainability is easy to claim and hard to practise. These are the constraints we design against.
Abundant materials
Rare-earth elements make excellent optical materials and poor supply-chain materials. The ore sits in a handful of places, and separating and refining it costs a great deal. If carbon can carry the same function, the choice stops being geopolitical.
No heavy metals
Many materials sold as green still rely on cadmium, lead or heavy-metal dopants. We use none of them. A material for lighting, sensing or security has to be safe to handle, safe to dispose of and safe to put in a product.
Biodegradable where it can be
Carbon-based emitters and polymer composites can be designed to break down instead of persisting. End-of-life is genuinely uncertain for coatings: a coating lasts as long as the window it sits on, and a window lasts decades.
Function over brightness
What a material can do matters more than how brightly it glows. Encoding, sensing, filtering and lasing each ask a different property of the emitter, and each is a better use of a scarce material than decoration.
Barun Kumar Barman, Assistant Professor
Principal investigator
Barun Kumar Barman
Sustainable photonic materials: rare-earth-free and metal-free optical emitters, micro-resonators and photonic barcodes.
Barun Kumar Barman leads the Sustainable Photonic Materials Lab at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research, SRM University AP. He trained as a chemist and materials scientist, and his work is on fluorescent carbon-based materials that can be fabricated into micro-resonators, optical gain media and transparent functional films. He trained as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Japan, and earlier published on electrocatalysis and energy-storage materials. The Sustainable Photonic Materials Lab combines that earlier work on sustainable carbon materials with photonic function in one programme.
- Based at
- Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (CIDR), SRM University AP, Amaravati
- Trained at
- National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Japan, as postdoctoral researcher
- Profiles
- Google Scholar ORCID
How we got here
Seven years, told through the work itself.
Every milestone below is a paper you can open.
All 40 publications →-
2019 to 2020
01Carbon as a support material
The early work made nitrogen-doped carbons for energy conversion: Pd-coated Ru nanocrystals and Ru nanodendrites on reduced and N-doped graphene for hydrogen evolution and oxygen reduction. The same period produced 3D N-doped graphitic carbon-encapsulated MnO-Co heterostructures for zinc-ion and zinc-air batteries.
- Chemical Communications
- New Journal of Chemistry
- ACS Applied Energy Materials
-
2021
02The first metal-free laser
Metal-free carbogenic quantum dots worked as a laser gain medium. The same carbon chemistry became transparent coatings: SiON-encapsulated N-doped carbon dots for hard coatings, and carbon-dot/cellulose films that screen UV and high-energy blue light. The cellulose film is the most-cited paper in the lab's record.
- JSAP EA
- ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering
-
2022 to 2023
03Reading the gain medium
A site-formulation study of N-doped carbon dots with tunable chromaticity, followed by an analysis of what limits fluorescent polymeric carbon dots as solid-state laser media. That analysis is where the programme became a photonics programme.
- ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering
-
2024
04Microbeads, and light that stays inside them
Three papers started the whispering-gallery programme. Bioinspired carbonized-polymer microspheres gave full-colour WGM emission. Rare-earth-metal-free microspheres emitted from red into the near-infrared for unclonable anti-counterfeit use. Spectrally reconfigurable microcavities produced white light with adaptable chromaticity.
- Advanced Science
- ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
-
2025
05From bead to barcode
Carbonized polymer dots became spectrally adaptable photonic microbarcodes. The code comes from the material's own synthesis history, not from a printed pattern.
- Advanced Optical Materials
-
2026
06Chameleons, and a wider spectral range
Four papers this year: chameleonic colour-variable microbead emitters for multilevel spectroscopic encryption across the visible and infrared; phenyl-modified carbon-nitride microcavities for rare-earth-free WGM emission; metal-free white light from a visible-to-NIR micro-emitter; and porous films that block NIR heat and UV-A while staying transparent.
- Advanced Optical Materials
- RSC Applied Interfaces
- Surfaces and Interfaces
Research areas
What the lab actually works on
Working with us
We are a small group, and we say yes to good problems.
The lab is looking for PhD students, and it is open to collaboration in colloidal and carbon chemistry, micro-resonator physics, thin-film coatings and optical instrumentation. If you work on materials that have to be manufactured rather than merely demonstrated, get in touch.
Current record
40 publications
across 5 research areas, at SRM University AP.