AJP	ISSN : 0971 – 3093 Vol 30, No 1, January, 2021

Asian
Journal of Physics

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Vol 30, No 1, January, 2021

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A Special Issue Dedicated
to
Prof Mahendra Singh Sodha

Guest Edited By : B P Pal & R S Sirohi

 

Anita Publications
FF-43, 1st Floor, Mangal Bazar, Laxmi Nagar, Delhi-110 092, India

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About Professor M S Sodha

Prof Mahendra Singh Sodha popularly known as Prof M S Sodha has a distinguished record of achievements in the fields of educational management, scientific research, industrial consultancy and teaching; he has the distinction of serving three universities viz. Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya Indore (MP), Lucknow University Lucknow (UP) and Barkatullah University Bhopal (MP) as Vice-Chancellor. He has also worked as Director of two self-financed engineering/management institutes (in India). Prof M S Sodha has also served Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD) in various capacities, including Professor, Head of Department, Dean Post Graduate Studies and Deputy Director; he was also a Member of the Board of Governors for a term.

Besides extensive research at national and international levels and teaching at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, Prof Sodha has worked as Chief of Space Physics at Republic Aviation Corporation, New York, U.S.A.; Senior Physicist at Armour Research Foundation, Chicago, USA and Visiting Scientist at the Solar Energy Research Institute, Golden Colorado, USA and Kuwait Institute of Scientific Research, Kuwait. He has also worked as Chief Technical Advisor with the World Bank/Cyprus Government and as a full-time consultant with UNESCO on Energy Planning and Conservation. He has also been a consultant to UNDP, Swedish Industrial Development Agency, Planning Commission and Solar Research Institute, U.S.A. Prof Sodha has served the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada as a PDF, Visiting Professor at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA and Senior Research Associate at NASA, Hampton, Va, USA.
He is a recipient of several prestigious awards like S S Bhatnagar Award given by CSIR (India) for Physical Sciences in 1974, Pioneer in Renewable Energy award by World Renewable Energy Network and UNESCO in 2002 and Dr K S Rao Memorial national award for lifetime achievement in renewable energy by SESI in 2004. He is one of the two first recipients of Saraswati Samman conferred by the U P Government. Besides being a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), New Delhi and the National Academy of Sciences (NASI) India, Allahabad, he has been President of the Optical Society of India, President of Plasma Society of India and Vice-President of Energy Society.
Prof M S Sodha is credited with having guided 75 candidates upto successful completion of their Ph D programme. In addition, he has authored/edited 15 books which were published by internationally reputed publishers like Plenum, Pergamon, Springer, John Wiley, etc. Most recent one was Kinetics of Complex Plasmas (Springer series in Atomic, Optical and Plasma Physics, 2014). He has also published over 625 research papers including 14 reviews in international journals/monographs/books of repute. He is credited of having coined the term colloidal plasma for a special type of plasma. In addition, he has published 30 articles on different aspects of higher education.
The honor of Padmashri was conferred on Prof Sodha by President of India in 2003. He has been Chief Guest at the Convocation ceremonies of Agra University and Kanpur University, India.
As a visionary, he has been extremely quick in identifying/realizing the importance of an emerging field and would either pursue the same or motivate a close and younger colleague to pursue the same. That is how research on guided wave optics for optical communication and Biophotonics had begun at IIT Delhi almost from its nascent days in early to mid-1970s. He was quick to realize the importance of introducing research in non-conventional energy when the oil crisis began in 1973 and took significant initiative for the establishment of the Center of Energy Studies at IIT Delhi in 1976 as a national center.

About Guest Editors

Bishnu P Pal

Bishnu P Pal is currently Professor of Physics and Dean of Academics at Mahindra Ecole Centrale at Hyderabad India (www.mechyd.ac.in). Before joining this newly established college of Engineering in collaboration with Ecole Centrale Paris of France, he was a Professor of Physics for over 24 years (and as a Physics faculty member for about 34 years) at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, where he served as the Chairperson of the Physics Department (September 2008-December 2011) and also the Computer Services Center (September 2002-August 2005). He was deeply involved in introducing and developing the most sought-after interdisciplinary M Tech program on Optoelectronics and Optical Communication in 1980 at IIT Delhi. One of his research papers published in 1980 in Electronics Letters was reprinted in the IEE book “Progress in Optical Communication Vol II” ed by P J B Clarricoats and two of his authored/co-authored chapters from his edited book “Guided Wave Optical Components and Devices – Basics, Technology and Applications” (Academic Press, 2006) were reprinted in the book “The Optical Communications reference” (eds DeCusatis and Kaminow, Elsevier, 2010). He has edited 4 books published by Elsevier/Academic Press, John Wiley, Intech, Viva publishers. He has also contributed over 15 chapters – all by invitation in various books. Prof Pal has extensively contributed to sponsored research and industrial consultancy and especially several international collaborative research projects that involved UK, USA, Russia, and France. His current areas of research is guided wave optics and meta materials that broadly covers application-specific specialty optical fibers like dispersion tailoring fibers, fibers for gain flattened fiber amplifiers, large mode area fibers and fibers for DWDM transmission, all-fiber components and devices with focus on design, technology, and characterization including gain flattening filters for optical fiber amplifiers, fused fiber couplers, and wavelength interleavers as branching components for optical communication networks, designs of new generation microstructured optical fibers for supercontinuum light, dispersion compensation, metro optical networks, and mid-infrared photonics, THz photonics, optical fiber sensors, guided wave components based on silicon photonics, and Anderson type localization of light in a disordered optical waveguide lattice.

Prof Pal has worked as a guest scientist at ELAB at the then NTH Trondheim (now Norwegian University of Science and Technology) in Norway as NTNF (Royal Norwegian CSIR) Fellow, CNRS laboratory LPMC at University of Nice in France as Senior Foreign Scientist of CNRS for various periods, NIST Boulder Colorado in USA as a Fulbright Scholar, Heriot Watt University Edinburgh in UK as an Erasmus Mundus Scholar in Photonics, City U Hong Kong and University of Malay at Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia as Visiting Professor for various periods, and at Fraunhofer Institute fur PhysikalischeMesstechnikin Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow. He has been a founding member of Int. J. Optoelectron. (Taylor & Francis) and is currently a Member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of the journals: IEEE Photonics J (as Associate Editor), J Opt Comm (Germany), J Elect Engg & Tech (Korea), Optoelectron Letts. (Springer), J Korean Opt Soc (Korea), Photonic Sensors (Springer), Journal of Electromagnetic Waves and Applications (Taylor & Francis) and Kiran of the Indian Laser Society.

He has published and reported over 225 research papers and research reviews in peer reviewed international journals and conferences, over 55 plenary/invitedtalks at international conferences and has co-authored one each Indian and US patent. His Google Scholar h-index is 23 and i10 index is 62. Prof Pal is a Fellow of OSA The Optical Society (USA) and SPIE (USA), Honorary Foreign Member of the Royal Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters (DKNVS, Norway), Distinguished Fellow of Optical Society of India (OSI) and Fellow of IETE (India), Senior Member of IEEE (USA). He is a recipient of the prestigious Esther Hoffman Beller Medal of The Optical Society OSA (USA) for the centennial year 2016 of OSA, co-recipient of the First Fiber Optic Person of the Year award in 1997 instituted by Lucent Technology in India, Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Photonics Society (formerly LEOS) USA for 2005-2007 during which he had extensively travelled and lectured around the world on his research, recipient of the Homi Bhabha Award of UGC (India) for excellence in Applied Sciences for 2006, OSI (India) LifeTime Achievement award (2010), Prof Y T Thathachari Prestigious Research Award in Physical Science of Bhramara Trust Mysore for 2010, CEOT 2010 award of IETE(India), Om Prakash Bhasin National award for Electronics and Information Technology 2013, and Khosla National Research Award 2014 of IIT Roorkee for lifetime achievements in India. Prof Pal was a Member of the Board of Directors (2009-2011) of OSA The Optical Society (USA), and President of the Optical Society of India from 2012 till 2015.

R S Sirohi

Rajpal S Sirohi is currently serving in the Physics Department, Alabama A&M University, Huntsville, Alabama USA. Prior to this (2013-2016), he was the Chair Professor, Physics Department, Tezpur University, Tezpur, Assam, India. He was Distinguished Scholar (2011-2013) in the Department of Physics and Optical Engineering, Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, Indiana, USA. During 2000-2011, he had been deeply engaged in academic administration and research as Director, IIT Delhi (Dec. 2000-April 2005); Vice-Chancellor, Barkatullah University, Bhopal (April 2005-Sept. 2007); Vice-Chancellor, Shobhit University, Meerut (Oct.2007-March 2008); Vice-Chancellor, Amity University Rajasthan, Jaipur (March 2008-Oct.2009) and Vice-Chancellor, Invertis University, Bareilly (Jan 2011-Oct.2011). He was also Visitor to Teerthanker Mahaveer University, Moradabad (June 2012- June 2013). Prof Sirohi did his Masters in Physics in 1964 from Agra University, and Post M Sc in Applied Optics and Ph D in Physics both from Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi in 1965 and 1970, respectively. Prof Sirohi was Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering Department at Indian Institute of Technology Madras during 1971-1979. He became Professor in the Physics Department of the same Institute in 1979. He superannuated in April 2005 from IIT Delhi.

Prof Sirohi worked in Germany as a Humboldt Fellow at PTB, Braunschweig, and as a Humboldt Awardee at Oldenburg University. He was a Senior Research Associate at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, and Associate Professor, and Distinguished Scholar at Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, Indiana. He was ICTP (International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste Italy) Consultant to Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Malaya, Malaysia and ICTP Visiting Scientist to the University of Namibia. He was Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore and EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Prof Sirohi is Fellow of several important academies/ societies in India and abroad including the Indian National Academy of Engineering; National Academy of Sciences India; Optical Society of America; Optical Society of India; SPIE (The International Society for Optical Engineering); Instrument Society of India and honorary fellow of ISTE and Metrology Society of India. He is member of several other scientific societies, and founding member of Indian Laser Association. Prof Sirohi was also the Chair for SPIE-INDIA Chapter, which he established with co-operation from SPIE in 1995 at IIT Madras. He was invited as JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Fellow and JITA Fellow to Japan. He was a member of the Education Committee of SPIE.

Prof Sirohi has received the following awards from various organizations:

Humboldt Research Award (1995) by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany; Galileo Galilei Award of International Commission for Optics (1995); Amita De Memorial Award of the Optical Society of India (1998); 13th Khwarizmi International Award, IROST (Iranian Research Organisation for Science and Technology (2000); Albert Einstein Silver Medal, UNESCO (2000); Dr. YT Thathachari Prestigious Award for Science by Thathachari Foundation, Mysore (2001); Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru Award in Engineering & Technology for 2000 (awarded in 2002) by MP Council of Science and Technology; NRDC Technology Invention Award on May 11, 2003; Sir CV Raman Award: Physical Sciences for 2002 by UGC (University Grants Commission); Padma Shri, a national Civilian Award (2004); Sir CV Raman Birth Centenary Award (2005) by Indian Science Congress Association, Kolkata; Holo-Knight (2005), inducted into Order of Holo- Knights during the International Conference-Fringe 05-held at Stuttgart, Germany; Centenarian Seva Ratna Award (2004) by The Centenarian Trust, Chennai; Instrument Society of India Award (2007); Gabor Award (2009) by SPIE (The International Society for Optical Engineering) USA; UGC National Hari OM Ashram Trust Award – Homi J. Bhabha Award for Applied Sciences (2005) by UGC; Distinguished Alumni Award (2013) by Indian Institute of Technology Delhi; Vikram Award 2014 by SPIE (The International Society for Optical Engineering) USA.

Prof Sirohi was the President of the Optical Society of India during 1994-1996. He was also the President of Instrument Society of India for three terms (2003-06, 2007-09, 2010-12). He was on the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Modern Optics, UK and on the editorial Boards of the Journal of Optics (India), Optik, Indian Journal of Pure and Applied Physics. He was Guest Editor to the Journals “Optics and Lasers in Engineering” and “Optical Engineering”. He was Associate Editor of the International Journal “Optical Engineering”, USA during (1999-Aug.2013), and currently is its Senior Editor. He is the Series Editor of the Series on ‘Advances in Optics, Photonics and Optoelectronics’ published by Institute of Physics Publishing, UK. He is also on the Editorial Board of Asian Journal of Physics.

Prof Sirohi has 456 papers to his credit with 244 published in national and international journals, 67 papers in Proceedings of the conferences and 145 presented in conferences. He has authored/co-authored/edited thirteen books including five milestones for SPIE. He was Principal Coordinator for 26 projects sponsored by Government Funding Agencies and Industries, has supervised 25 Ph D theses, 7 M S theses and numerous B Tech, M Sc and M Tech theses.

Prof Sirohi’s research areas are Optical Metrology, Optical Instrumentation, Laser Instrumentation, Holography and Speckle Phenomenon.

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Asian Journal of Physics
(A Publication Not for Profit)
Volume 30, No 1 (2021)

CONTENTS

 

Resolving power of optical instruments: A Tutorial
Rajpal Sirohi31