Optics & Photonics News - July/August 2012

its transformation into a city with clean roads and busses equipped with GPS.

RRCAT, like IGCAR, is under the purview of the Department of Atomic Energy. It specializes in lasers and particle physics. The fiber optics lab is headed by Shri Sanjay Kher. Kher’s group is developing an indigenous distributed fiber optic sensor. The team’s most endearing trait is its practicality. For example, if we needed a BNC cable or any other component, Kher himself would walk through nearby labs to find one, rather than wait for someone else to deliver it. Rakesh Kumar Sharma was the lab’s efficient and hard-working scientific assistant. He was so proficient with fiber optics that he could strip and cleave a fiber with a surgical blade.

Cool mishti dohi on a hot summer day in Kolkata

Ashukal

Indore city bus

B
C

Coastal view of Kalpakkam

Marina beach in Chennai
A
D

Prateek Karandikar/ Wikimedia Commons

A map of my journey to different fiber optics labs in India: (A) Kalpakkam, (B) Indore, (C) Kolkata and (D) back home to Chennai.

CC-by-sa PlaneMad/Wikipedia

Kolkata

The next leg of my journey took me east to Kolkata, known as the city of joy. The train traveled through Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, two states with a distinct northern Indian flavor. The trains to Kolkata are more crowded than those to Indore, but the strangers still talk non-stop like old friends. The “apnapan,” a phrase that roughly translates to “a feeling of oneness,” was present here. Kolkata is known for its rasgola (a sweet milk delicacy) and mishti dahi (sweet yogurt)—and the people are as sweet as these treats.

Here, I worked in the fiber optics lab at the Centre for Glass and Ceramic Research Institute (CGCRI), which, along with the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, arguably hosts the best minds in fiber optics in the country. Kamal Das Gupta heads the lab, which houses such luminaries as S.K. Bhadra and Tarun Gangopadhyay (my mentor). We had access to state-of-the-art equipment, including a fiber drawing machine and FBG writing system to research regenerated FBGs, specialty optical fibers, fiber lasers and fiber amplifiers.

The fiber optics group at CGCRI is incredibly charming. Every evening, they would meet at the roof top to eat and share a cup of tea or coffee. The friendly atmosphere that bonds the students and

Kolkata is known for its
rasgola (a sweet milk
delicacy) and mishti
dahi (sweet yogurt)—
and the people are as
sweet as these treats.

the scientists made the group stand out in my mind.

Delhi, Guhawati and
back to Chennai

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are some of the best research and engineering institutes in the country, and they are often counted among the best in the world. IIT Delhi is home to Ajoy Ghatak and K. Thyagarajan, whose book An Introduction to Fiber Optics is a must-read for any graduate student learning the fundamentals of the field. A lab led by B.P. Pal works on cutting-edge waveguide modeling, fused fiber couplers, quantum information and plasmonics.

IIT Guhawati, located in the more
scenic northeastern India, has an im-
portant fiber optics lab headed by Sunil
Khijwania. He studies photonic crystal
fibers, Bragg gratings, surface plasmon
resonance and bio- and nanophotonics.
There is also an IIT located at Chennai,
with Balaji Srinivasan, who is famous
for his research on FBGs and Fabry-
Perot interferometers. Like most IITs,
the campus is big, lush and often visited
by wildlife.

Pandian Chelliah ( chelliah.pandian@gmail.com) is a postdoctoral researcher at Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey. He received his Ph.D. from the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research in Kalpakkam, India.