Our paper on ultra-compact waveguide taper in SOI appeared in Optical Express 
https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-25-9-10196
A novel design of large bandwidth, fabrication tolerant, CMOS-compatible compact tapers (15 µm) have been proposed and experimentally demonstrated in silicon-on-insulator. The proposed taper along with linear grating couplers for spot-size conversion exhibits no degradation in the coupling efficiency compared to a standard focusing grating in 1550 nm band. A single taper design has a broadband operation over 600 nm that can be used in O, C and L-band. The proposed compact taper is highly tolerant to fabrication variations; ±80 nm change in the taper width and ±200 nm in end waveguide width varies the taper transmission by <0.4 dB. The footprint of the device i.e. taper along with the linear gratings is ~250 μm2; this is 20X smaller than the adiabatic taper and 2X smaller than the focusing grating coupler.
 

 
 
Aneesh paper on "Feasibility of Strain Detection in Graphene NEMS Using Silicon Photonics" accepted as oral presentation at IEEE Photonics conference 2016.
Congrats Aneesh. This is a collaborative work with Prof. Akshay Naik .
 
 
 

Prashanths paper on "Full-Range Detection in Cascaded Microring Sensors using Thermo-Optical Tuning" accepted for publication in IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology. Congrats Prashanth. This is a colobrative work with Prof. Manoj Verma. 

 
Avijith and Awanish selected to present their work at Visvesvaraya PhD fellows workshop; Congrats to both.