Foreword

I feel immense pleasure to write the foreword to the book, titled “Photonic materials: recent advances and emerging applications” edited by Dr. Aavishkar Katti and Dr. Yogesh Sharma. One of the editors, Dr. Katti is already known in the science community as he has authored a research monograph “Optical Spatial Solitons in Photorefractive Materials” on the photorefractive solitons and their various applications, which is published by Springer, Singapore. He is an expert in photorefractive materials and non-linear dynamics. The other editor, Dr. Sharma has been deeply involved in research on band gap engineering in magnetic photonic crystals. Both editors are well known to me as they have obtained their doctoral degrees from Banaras Hindu University.

This book describes current and cutting-edge research in the diverse area of photonics. There are fourteen chapters in the book covering theoretical, computational, and experimental research in photonic crystals, nonlinear optical materials, solar cells, semiconductor heterostructures, nano photonics, graphene-based photonics, and silicon photonics among other topics . Near the beginning, the chapters discuss optical logic gates, power splitter, polarizer, all-optical XOR gate, and optical properties of one-dimensional layered structure containing germanium. This optical XOR gate would replace the XOR gate based on semiconductors in the near future. The effect of the photovoltaic field on phase shift grating formed by nonlinear photorefractive materials is well described in one of the chapters.

When you will further delve deeper into the book, you will find chapters based on graphene plasmonics, third-generation solar cells and the use of graphene in solar cells. Solar cells are always looked at as an alternative to conventional energy sources since they are used for energy tapping through the Sun. The use of graphene for increasing the efficiency of solar cells has been investigated. Nowadays, nanophotonics has aroused the interest of the scientific research community. A few chapters focus on the properties and applications of optical materials used for nanophotonics. Recent research on fiber Bragg gratings has been beautifully captured in subsequent chapters while novel materials have been investigated in the next chapters. The applications of mono chalcogenides, transition metal dichalcogenides, and MXenes from fibre laser have been discussed . Some smart materials in photonics have also been reviewed. Lastly, the book includes Monte Carlo, stochastic collocation, and polynomial chaos expansion techniques for modelling of photonic integrated circuits.

This book is useful for beginners and advanced researchers in different fields of theoretical or experimental optics and photonics, and material science. Graduates in physical sciences who are interested to pursue research in photonics will be highly benefitted from this book. I wish the book all the success and hope that it is useful for its target audience.