Agrawal Research Group

We study nonlinear phenomena in optical fibers and waveguides for a variety of applications including optical communications.

Recent News

November 2024: Agrawal visited Prof. John Dudley from November 18-20, 2024, at the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon, France . He gave a seminar and toured the historical museum of optics instruments . The photo shows Agrawal during his seminar at the femto-st Institute.

November 2024: Agrawal visited Prof. Stefan Wabnitz at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, from October 28-30, 2024. He gave a seminar on the first day and had interesting discussions with the members of his research group. This photo was taken in Prof. Wabnitz’s laboratory, standing next to Agrawal in the front row.

October 2024: Agrawal is spending the Fall semester at the University of Bourgogne in Dijon, France, working with Prof. Guy Millot and others. This photo was taken during the workshop on Nonlinear Fiber Optics, held on October 8 . Prof. Millot is sitting next to Agrawal and Prof. Finot is in front of him.

September 2024: Agrawal visited University of Lille on Sept. 20 at the invitation of the Optica Student Chapter and gave a seminar attended by many students and the faculty members. He also toured several Labs. This photo was taken in the Laboratory of Prof. Siddharth Sivankutty (in the middle).

July 2024: Two PhD students of Prof. Agrawal graduated recently from his group. Luis Cortes Herrera (on the right) did so on June 27 and Junchi Zhang (on the left) on July 9. Luis has a postdoc position at University of North Texas in the group of Prof. Yuzhe Xiao. Junchi joined the company Lumentum in September 2024.

May 2024: Prof. Agrawal participated in the CLEO meeting held in Charlotte, NC, from May 6-10. This photo was taken by him during the CLEO reception at the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Alexis Sparapani of Argentina, who visited Agrawal’s group in Fall 2023, had a poster presentation. Agrawal’s senior Ph.D. student, Junchi Zhang, also gave a talk on his recent work on temporal reflection.

January 2024: Prof. Agrawal visited the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi, India from Dec. 27 to Dec. 31. He was invited to participate and deliver a plenary talk in the workshop on Quantum and Nonlinear optics, held on December 29 and organized by the IIT’s Optics and Photonics Center. Agrawal is thankful to Prof. Anurag Sharma and Prof. Ravi Varshney for the hospitality extended to him during his stay at IIT Delhi.

December 2023: Photo on the left shows the names of people in the photo I posted in July 2020 (see below). This image was sent to me recently by Prof. Harald Giessen, who was present at the 1995 Gordon Research Conference on Nonlinear Optics. Ferenc Krausz, who received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics, also attended this conference.

Fall 2023: My research group hosted two visitors in the Fall 2023.. Christos Flytzanis (2nd from left) came for two weeks and Alexis Sparapani (on right) spent three months. Luis Cortes (on left) is a senior graduate student in my group.

June 2023: This is the cover of Agrawal’s new book on Physics and Engineering of Graded-Index Media . The book was published by Cambridge University Press in August 2023. It can be bought on Amazon using this link. You can also find it at the publisher’s website.

May 2023: Dr. Amira Ahsan received her PhD degree in Optics during the commencement ceremony held on May 12, 2023 at the Eastman Theatre, Rochester, NY. Prof. Agrawal hooded her at the stage during the ceremony.

Sept. 2022: Amira Ahsan defended successfully her Ph.D.  work in August 2022. She has now joined the well-known company ASML, Inc. in Wilton, CT. We all wish her success in her scientific and industrial adventures.

July 2022: Agrawal spent the month of June as an Invited Professor in the Physics Dept. of the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) at Paris, France. While visiting there, Agrawal worked on the topic of chiral nonlinear materials and gave a seminar entitled “Space-time Duality in Optics.”

June 2021: This is the cover of the 5th edition of Agrawal’s well-known book on Fiber-Optic ommunication Systems (its 4th ed. appeared in 2010). The book was published by Wiley in June 2021. It can be bought on Amazon using this link. You can also find it at the publisher’s website.

Book Cover

January 2021: This is the cover of the new book Theoretical Foundations of Nanoscale Quantum Devices (by M. Premaratne and G. P. Agrawal) published by Cambridge University Press in January 2021. It and can be bought on Amazon using this link. You can also find it at the publisher’s website.

October 2020: Agrawal received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Hajim School of Engineering at University of Rochester. Follow this link for more details.

August 2020: This is the cover of the third edition of Prof. Agrawal’s book Applications of Nonlinear Fiber optics. The book has been available since September 2020 and can be bought on Amazon using this link. You can also find it at the publisher’s website. The sixth edition of the Nonlinear Fiber optics book is also available at Amazon.

July 2020: This photograph was taken 25 years ago during a Gordon Conference on nonlinear optics (July 1995). Here is a little test for you. Check how many people you can identify. If you can identify more than 20, you are allowed to call yourself an expert in the field of nonlinear optics.

Jan. 2020: Prof. Agrawal Visited Prof. Deepa Ventikesh at IIT Madras in Chennai, India for two weeks in December 2019. This group photo was taken in her laboratory. My PhD student, Amira Ahsan, spent three months in her group on a SPARC funded project.

October 2019: Agrawal received the OSA’s Max Born Award during the award ceremony held on September 16, 2019 at Frontiers in Optics Conference in Washington, DC.
More information is available at the Optical Society (OSA) website.

September 2019:The sixth edition of the Nonlinear Fiber Optics book (see the cover) was published in September 2019.
More information is available at the publisher’s website.

July 2019: Agrawal received EPS’s Quantum Electronics Medal during the award ceremony held on June 25, 2019 at CLEO Europe Conference in Munich, Germany. More information is available at the European Physical Society website.