The lab, one researcher at a time.

Vijayakumar Balakrishnan works on nonlinear optics and light-matter interaction in nanostructured materials. His record is in optical limiting: rare-earth and transition-metal doped phosphates, tungstates and carbon-nitride heterojunctions, and the mechanisms behind two-photon absorption, optical Kerr nonlinearity and ultrafast photo-excited carrier dynamics. He trained in the optical-nonlimiting group of Prof. T. C. S. Girisun at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and his work on defect-state enhanced third-order nonlinearity in Bi-doped MnWO4 and on Zn-doped Bi2WO6 showed how structural distortion and dopant energy levels set the limiting threshold. At the Sustainable Photonic Materials Lab he works on the light-matter side of the same question: what a nonlinear response does inside a confined optical field, and how a micro-resonator changes it. He is the co-author, with the lab's principal investigator, of the 2026 paper on metal-free single-component white-light emission and visible-to-NIR whispering-gallery micro-emitters published in RSC Applied Interfaces.

Hitaishi V is a physicist working on nonlinear optics and integrated photonics, with a focus on supercontinuum generation in dispersion-engineered waveguides. He completed his PhD in Physics at VIT-AP University in 2025, working with Prof. Nandam Ashok on the design and numerical analysis of chalcogenide waveguides. His published work spans mid-IR supercontinuum generation in D-shaped and semi-ellipse core waveguides at 4 μm, broadband supercontinuum in dispersion-engineered As2Se3–GeAsSe–GeAsS waveguides at 6 μm, and tellurium-based chalcogenide waveguides for dispersion and supercontinuum applications. Alongside this he has contributed to Tamm–Fano plasmonic and slot-waveguide microring sensors for refractive-index and glucose sensing. He writes open-source computational photonics. His package photonics_helper is published on PyPI and carries a generalised nonlinear Schrödinger equation solver with vector and multimode engines, a Raman response database spanning 44 materials, second- and third-order nonlinear optics, FROG trace retrieval and a transfer-matrix method for distributed Bragg reflectors. In the lab he works on the computational side of photonic materials: inverse design and physics-informed machine learning applied to micro-resonators and gain media. Before his PhD he studied at JSS College of Arts, Commerce and Science, Mysuru, and at Dayananda Sagar College, Bengaluru. He is GATE-qualified in Physics.