Alexandre Bresson

Detecting inertial effects with airborne matter-wave interferometry

Inertial sensors relying on atom interferometry offer a breakthrough advance in a variety of applications, such as inertial navigation, gravimetry or ground- and space-based tests of fundamental physics. These instruments require a quiet environment to reach their performance and using them outside the laboratory remains a challenge. Here we report the first operation of an airborne matter-wave accelerometer set up aboard a 0g plane and operating during the standard gravity (1g) and microgravity (0g) phases of the flight. At 1g, the sensor can detect inertial effects more than 300 times weaker than the typical acceleration fluctuations of the aircraft. We describe the improvement of the interferometer sensitivity in 0g, which reaches 2 x 10-4 ms-2 / √Hz with our current setup. We finally discuss the extension of our method to airborne and spaceborne tests of the Universality of free fall with matter waves.

Experimental Study of Strut Injectors in a Supersonic Combustor Using OH-PLIF

The present experimental study, carried out in the framework of ONERA-JAXA cooperation, deals with the ignition and hydrogen flame development in a supersonic air flow at Mach 2.5, with stagnation conditions of 0.6 MPa and 1620 K. Different types of struts for hydrogen injection (equivalence ratio of 0.45) have been investigated. Some (Alternating-Wedge struts) are specially designed to enhance fuel-air mixing by the creation of streamwise vortices. The principal aim of this study is to obtain information on the flow structures in the supersonic combusting mixing layer, and the location of ignition and combustion zones. Instantaneous maps of the OH radical by means of the OH-PLIF technique in two planes downstream of the strut injector and conventional observations of the flame by video camera have been obtained. These visualizations are completed by global measurements of the ignition delays and heat release by means of wall pressure measurements. The efficiency of the different strategies of fuel injections are then compared and discussed.

Simultaneous dual-species matter-wave accelerometer

We report the realization of a matter-wave interferometer based on Raman transitions which simultaneously interrogates two different atomic species (

Light-pulse atom interferometry in microgravity

^{87}

Dual-wavelength laser source for onboard atom interferometry

Rb and

Compact cold atom gravimeter for field applications

^{85}

Local gravity measurement with the combination of atom interferometry and Bloch oscillations

Rb). The simultaneous aspect of our experiment presents encouraging preliminary results for future dual-species atom interferometry projects and seems very promising by taking advantage of a differential acceleration measurement. Indeed the resolution of our differential accelerometer remains lower than

Characterization of a simultaneous dual-species atom interferometer for a quantum test of the weak equivalence principle

3.9\times 10^{-8}g

Phase shift in an atom interferometer induced by the additional laser lines of a Raman laser generated by modulation

even with vibration levels up to

Simultaneous temperature, concentration, and velocity fields measurements in a turbulent heated jet using combined laser-induced fluorescence and PIV

1\times10^{-3}g