Professor
PhD, University of Chicago, 1980
Fellow, American Physical Society
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
Pulak Dutta's research is focussed on nanoscale order in soft materials, particularly at surfaces and interfaces. A material is considered 'soft' if its structure and thus its properties are easily changed; interfaces cause molecules to arrange in new ways and thus help build potentially useful new materials. Dutta's research group seeks to understand what structures are formed under what conditions, and why. In particular, they do in-situ X-ray scattering studies on physisorbed (so-called Langmuir) and chemisorbed (so-called self-assembled) molecular monolayers and multilayers, and on interfacial liquids. Much of this research is done using synchrotron radiation at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, and at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Selected Publications
- Structural Signal of a Dynamic Glass Transition
S. Chattopadhyay, A. Uysal, B. Stripe, G. Evmenenko, S. Ehrlich, E. A. Karapetrova, and P. Dutta
Physical Review Letters 103, 175701 (2009) 
Effects of Chitosan on the Morphology and Alignment of Calcite Crystals Nucleating under Langmuir Monolayers
Kyungil Kim, Ahmet Uysal, Sumit Kewalramani, Benjamin Stripe, and Pulak Dutta
CrystEngComm 11, 130 (2009)- Observation of an Organic-Inorganic Lattice Match (Templating) during Biomimetic Growth of (001)-Oriented Calcite Crystals under Floating Sulfate Monolayers
S. Kewalramani, K. Kim, B. Stripe, G. Evmenenko, G. H. B. Dommett, and P. Dutta
Langmuir 24, 10579 (2008) - Observation of a Liquid-to-Layered Transition in Thin Liquid Films when Surface and Interface Regions Overlap
D. R. Lee, P. Dutta, and C. J. Yu, Physical Review E 77, 030601 (2008)
