SPIE Student Chapter – IIT Madras, Chennai – 600036, India

Annual Report 2018-19

Contents:

1. New chapter officers

2. Current members

3. Previous year activity proposal

4. Chapter activities:

4.1 Invited lecture series

4.2 Industrial visit

4.3 Procurement of Optics kit for school outreach

4.4 Students project

4.5 Outreach program

5. Financial status

1. SPIE– IIT Madras student chapter officers

The election for the new officers was held in April 2018.

S. No Name Position Membership

No.

Email

1 Vivek Sivakumar President 4056742 am15d034@smail.iitm.ac.in

2 Rahul VR Vice President 4108754

3 Srikarthikeyan Kumar Secretary 4122854

4 Aneesh Vincent Treasurer 4111935

2. Current members

List of members

1 Vikas Kumar Anand 9 VC Pretheesh Kumar

2 Kabita Bhattacharjee 10 Mahima Sharma

3 Shashank Chetty 11 Prashanth Reddy Sheri

4 Pritha Dey 12 Vivek Sivakumar

5 Sayantan Ghosh 13 Sudersan Sridhar

6 Srikarthikeyan Kumar 14 Rahul Vaippully Rajan

7 Aghna Mukherjee 15 Vysakh Vasudevan

8 Manobalasankar Muthu

3. Previous year activity proposal

• Invited lecture series

• Spreading optics among school children through outreach program

• Industrial visits

4. Chapter activities

A series of activities were conducted by the SPIE Student Chapter of IIT Madras during this year, which saw the enthused interest and participation of many. Continuing with the last year’s report, activities conducted included interesting talks from eminent people, in collaboration with the OSA IITM Chapter, and industrial lab visits, a student-based project and an outreach workshop for school students.

Invited lecture series

S.No Date Speaker Topic

1 February 23, 2018 Dr. Ravi Pant, Asst. Prof, IISER-TVM

Coherent interactions between Brillouin pathways: Controlled wideband excitation of Fano resonance and induced transparency

2 August 17, 2018 Dr. Antigone Marino, CNR, ISASI

Liquid crystals for Optical applications

3 September 3, 2018

Prof. Joel Fontaine National Institute for Applied Sciences, Icube Laboratory, France

Photonic jet: from sub-micron machining to nanoscopy

4 November 29, 2018

Dr. O.S.K.S. Sastri, Professor of Physics, Department of Physics and Astronomical Sciences, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala

Optics experiments using image analysis in tracker and data acquisition with ExpEYES17

Industrial visit(s)

S. No Date Organization/Institute

1 September 20, 2018 Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Kodaikanal

Student Project

S. No Project description

1 Development of a Laser engraver

Outreach program(s)

S. No Date Program

1 February 23, 2019 Elementary optics workshop for school students, titled ‘Let there be light’

4.1 Student chapter meetings In April 2018, a chapter meeting was held to elect the new chapter office bearers.

Further, informal meetings were held every month to discuss and plan the activities to be

conducted, and also to draft a rough plan of the Chapter activities for the next year.

4.1 Invited talks

1. Title: Coherent interactions between Brillouin pathways: Controlled wideband

excitation of Fano resonance and induced transparency by Dr. Ravi Pant

Dr Ravi Pant, who works as an Assistant Professor at IISER-Trivandrum, is currently working on

coherent interaction between Brilloiuin pathways, nonlinear phenomena in micro-resonators

and soliton self-frequency shift.

In his talk, Dr. Ravi Pant discussed the quantum phenomena of electromagnetically induced

transparency and Fano resonance, resulting from the coherent interaction between two

excitation pathways. He also elaborated on the challenges that are encountered in the control

excitation of these phenomena over a wide frequency range. This talk was held in collaboration

with the OSA -IITM chapter on 23rd February.

2. Title: Liquid crystals for Optical applications by Dr. Antigone Marino On 17th August, the SPIE student chapter and the OSA chapter of IIT Madras jointly organized an

invited talk by Dr. Antigone Marino from the Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent systems

(ISASI) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR).

An OSA ambassador, Dr. Marino’s research activities include study of soft matter optics applied

to telecommunication, with a special interest in liquid crystals (LC) technologies. In this very

interesting and elaborate talk, she reviewed the most famous and latest LC applications and

described how the knowledge of the basic physics of a material can make it possible to realize

amazing optical applications.

Dr. Antigone Marino addressing the students

3. Title: Photonic jet: from sub-micron machining to nanoscopy by Prof Joel Fontaine

Prof. Joel Fontaine during his talk at IITM, Chennai

Prof. Joel Fontaine, a Professor of Physics and Optoelectronics AT INSA Strasbourg and University

of Strasbourg, France since 1981, is currently the Director of Research and member of the Icube

laboratory. In his very animated talk, Prof. Fontaine discussed the topic of Photonic jets, a highly

concentrated propagating laser beam with a FWHM smaller than the diffraction limit. He gave a

virtual trip to the development of Photonic jets, that is being carried out at Icube laboratory, for

marking, etching, texturing, cutting materials such as metals and semiconductors at the micron

scale. He also described how these jets can be potentially used in high resolution microscopy.

This talk was held in collaboration with the OSA-IITM Student chapter on 3rd September.

4. Title: Optics experiments using image analysis in tracker and data acquisition with

ExpEYES17 by Dr. O.S.K.S. Sastri

Dr. O.S.K.S Sastri, who is currently serving as the Professor of Physics at the Central University of

Himachal Pradesh, has been passionately involved in teaching Physics with innovative

computerization experiments and simulations to enhance learning for the past 16 years. A very

passionate physicist, who refers to himself as an educationist, Dr. Sastri in his talk discussed and

demonstrated optics experiments involving the phenomena of interference and polarization

where the images obtained from the intensity profile were analyzed using ExpEYES17, a Tracker

software.

Dr. Sastri, was invited by the SPIE- IITM Student chapter on 29th November. In his talk, where he

began with an invocation song, much to everyone’s surprise, also questioned and discussed the

role of teachers and practical teaching methods in enthusing the interest of students in Physics.

Dr. Amol Choudhary during his talk on February 5 at IITM, Chennai

4.2 Industrial visits

Visit to the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Kodaikanal

The Indian Institute of Astrophysics at Kodaikanal, also known for the tourist attraction, the

Kodaikanal Solar Observatory (KSO), is located in the beautiful Palani range of hills in Southern

India. Established in 1899 as a Solar physics Observatory when all the activities of the Madras

Observatory were shifted to Kodaikanal.

Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Solar Observatory, Kodaikanal

On 20th September, we visited the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIAP) at Kodaikanal, which

houses a 20cm refractor for cometary and occultation observations, an astronomy museum, and

a library, which has a collection of astronomical literature of archival value. With the main object

of observation, the Sun, more than a century long observation of the sun are being continuously

actively pursued at the Kodaikanal Solar observatory.

We also visited the spectro-lab, observed the various instruments and teelscopes used to obtain

images of the sun. The people at IIAP fondly described the interesting history of the organization,

the phenomena surrounding the sun, and the solar system, making us realize the vastness of the

universe against our very finite existence. They also explained and gave a demonstration of the

Evershed effect, which was discovered at IIAP by the British astronomer John Evershed. This is

one of the major findings made in solar physics from Indian soil.

4.3 Procurement of Optics kit for school outreach

The 2018 Optics Outreach kit -the SPIE Khet2 Basic kits was delivered on 17th September 2018

for school outreach purposes.

4.4 Student project – development of a laser engraving machine

A Laser engraver was built up in house as a part of developing a student project under the SPIE

student chapter. A fully automated, low cost, high precision, portable engraver was setup which

makes use of a laser source to engrave on surfaces like wood, cardboard, metal, acrylic etc. Any

image file containing characters or line diagrams are loaded into MATLAB (Mathworks Inc., 2016

version) where algorithms are written for edge detection. The coordinates for motor movements

are extracted from these boundaries or edges and is fed to an ARDUINO controller (Arduino Uno

R3 ATmega328P ATMEGA16U2) which are used for controlling two stepper motors

(JK57HS,NEMA 23 stepper motor, 1.8 deg, 2.8Nm torque) for aligning the lasers in corresponding

x and y directions. Programs are written into ARDUINO for sequential pulsing of the motors based

on the coordinates received. Based on the pulsing sequence the motors driven by high current

motor drivers will align the laser to their respective position and laser is turned on for engraving.

4.5 School outreach workshop ‘Let there be Light’ for students

Elementary optics workshop for school students, titled ‘Let there be light’ was conducted on 23rd

February 2019 for students of grades VII and VIII to inspire awareness of light and light-based

applications. Around 70 students from 17 schools participated in this program. As a part of this

event, lectures by several eminent professors from IIT madras were conducted with a question

and answer session.

Address by Prof. A.R. Ganesan, Faculty advisor, SPIE student chapter IIT Madras

.

Lecture by Surendra P. Singh, University Professor, Department of Physics, J. William Fulbright

College of Arts & Sciences, University of Arkansas Fayetteville, AR

Lecture by Professor C. Vijayan, Professor, Department of Physics, IIT Madras

Demonstration of Basics of Light and Applications by the SPIE Team, IIT Madras:

The SPIE team demonstrated the SPIE optics outreach kit as well as several other experiments

and models designed to inspire curiosity among the participating students. Basic phenomena

such as interference, diffraction and polarization were explained and optical techniques such as

spectroscopy were demonstrated. Basic optical instruments and experiments such as foldable

microscope (Foldscope), Kaleidoscope, Monocular telescope, image formation using lenses, laser

engraver and Human eye model etc. were used in this session for educating the students. This

session resulted in enthusiastic participation of the students who were given a hands-on

experience on these topics.

Optics Model Building workshop:

Quiz competition: Oral and written

Speaker Memento presentations and Participation awards:

Award winners for the quiz competition

SPIE Student Chapter- IIT Madras team 2018-2019

Feedback from participants:

“We the teachers and students of PSBB KKN place on record our sincere thanks to have accommodated two teams and 2 teachers for the enlightening 'Let there be light' workshop at your prestigious institution by SPIE-Student Chapter of IIT-Madras. The introductory speeches by Prof. C Vijayan & Prof. A R Ganesan kindled interest among the students in the topic on light. Questions such as... Is light visible? What will happen if two light waves superimpose on each other? Is light composed of particles or waves? Etc. made the students of 7th and 8th curious to know the correct answers. The session of demonstrations on ' How light works' was spectacular and at the same time interesting. The students were involved in groups in doing activities on studying the patterns formed by white light and monochromatic light during diffraction. The resources were used carefully and we were informed that some of them were costly. Activities involving polarizing sheets were interesting. The session on ' How to put light to work' consisting of model building and various applications of light was useful to strengthen the concepts studied by students in 7 & 8 standard. The models of eye, pin - hole camera, kaleidoscope, telescope, foldscope, spectrometer, laser engraver and optical bench for studying formation of images by convex lens were handy and easy to operate. The volunteers were patience personified and answered the questions put forth by students with ease. The written quiz based on photonics and the method to arrive at the 2nd and 3rd places was exciting. The refreshments provided during the tea break and the sumptuous lunch kept the students energetic throughout the day. Not a moment during the day was boring or repetitive. We sincerely thank the students at SPIE and the professors for arranging such an interactive workshop to catch the children young to ask questions. Thanking you Yours sincerely, K.Meenakshi S.Lakshmi. Teachers of PSBBKKN”.

Financial Statement 2018-2019

Details of the Chapter’s Bank Account:

Name of the Account: IIT Madras SPIE Student Chapter Account No : 34138480114 SHIFT CODE : 1055 Bank : State Bank of India, IIT Madras Branch : IIT Madras

Amount details:

Closing Balance (as on 1st May 2016): 3,37,847/- Transaction details:

(I) Expenditure:

S.No Expenditure description Amount (in Rs) Credit (in Rs)

1 SPIE Chapter Banner 2200

2 Talk by Dr. Amol Choudhary 1558

3 Talk by Dr. Ravi Pant 1600

4 SPIE Mug(Memento) 950

5 Laser Engraver 24171 15000

6 Talk By Dr. Antigone Marino 1250

7 Visit to Solar Observatory Kodaikanal 30023 30000

8 Dr. Sastri Talk 15379 20000

9 “Let There Be Light”Programme 58742 70873

Total 135873 135873

S.No Description Amount (in Rs)

1 AMOUNT AVAILABLE AS ON 14th MARCH 2019 143463.4

2 EXPENDITURES (Ref. EXPENDITURES TABLE) 135873

3 BALANCE AMOUNT 7590.4

4 BALANCE AMOUNT IN THE BANK AS ON: February 6th,

2019 7590.4

Financial status as on MARCH 14th, 2019