ILA Best Thesis and Best Poster Awards in NLS-06:

Best Thesis awards:

Everey year, M/s Laser Spectra Services, Bangalore sponsors the BEST THESIS award in National Laser Symposium. In the GBM on 6-12-06, Shri N R P Kumar of M/s Laser Spectra Services, Bangalore offered to increase the award money from Rs5000 to Rs 10,000 from the year 2006 and onwards. This was highly appreciated by the General Body and approved unanimously.
In the NLS-06, there were 10 thesis presentations. The judges declared the following 4 (four) thesis as best and equal:

1. P. Mukhopadhyay, RRCAT, Indore on "Development and Characterization of Diode-Pumped Solid-State Lasers".
2. S. Mukhopadhyay, IIT, Kharagpur on "Development and stability study of nonlinear mirror Mode-locked Laser".
3. Avnish Sharma, RRCAT, Indore on "Development and Characterization of a Table Top Terawatt Nd:Glass Laser System and Ultrashort Pulse Diagnostics".
4. Atul Srivastava, IIT, Kanpur on "Optical Imaging and control of convection around a KDP crystal growing from its aqueous solution".

The winners got the award of Rs 2,500 each and certificates. The awards were given away by Dr P D Gupta, President, ILA, on concluding day of NLS-06 on 8-12-06.

Best Poster awards:

On demand of several members, the executive committee had proposed to increase the number of "Best Poster" awards during National Laser Symposium from this year and onwards. The executive committee proposed five equal "Best Posters" awards of each Rs. 1500/- (cash) in National Laser Symposium. This was accepted and approved by General Body. Later M/s Laser Science, Mumbai have offered to sponsor these awards which was appreciated and accepted.
In NLS-06, judges have declared the following 5 (five) papers as equal and Best Posters presented in the symposium.

1. "Performance of a High Power Transverse Flow CO2 Laser with a Super-Gaussian Graded Phase Mirror Resonator" authored by A. K. Biswas1, S. V. Ramagopal2, S. Kumar2, M. S. Bhagat1, C. H. Prem Singh1, and A. K. Nath1 belonging to 1RRCAT, Indore, 2CSIO, Chandigarh.
2. "Laser Surface Melting of AISI 304 Stainless Steel for Enhanced Intergranular Corrosion Resistance" authored by Sandip Mahajan1, P. Ganesh, K.N. Adhe2, Rakesh Kaul, Vivekanand Kain2, R.C. Prasad1, A.K. Nath belonging to RRCAT, Indore, 1IIT, Mumbai, 2BARC, Mumbai.
3. "Effect of ZnO and SnO2 Doping on the Optical Properties of SiC Thin Films Prepared Using Pulsed Laser Deposition" authored by A. P. Detty, J. R. Rani, K. J. Lethy, Reji Philip, V.P.Mahadevan Pillai belonging to University of Kerala, Kerala.
4. "Focusing of Femtosecond Pulses in Air-Multiple Filamentation" authored by P. Prem Kiran, S. Bagchi, G. Ravindra Kumar belonging to TIFR, Mumbai.
5. "On the Origin of Dual Band Emission from UV Exposed TPD Solution" authored by M. P. Joshi, S. Raj Mohan, Beena Jain, T. S. Dhami, S. K. Tiwari belonging to RRCAT, Indore.

The authors of the each winner paper were given Rs 1500/- cash prize money and a certificate. Shri U Nundy, Convenor NLS-06, has given away the awards and certificates to the winners.

(S R Mishra, General Secretary II, ILA)