Claude Fabre

Elemental Geochemistry of Sedimentary Rocks at Yellowknife Bay, Gale Crater, Mars.

Sedimentary rocks examined by the Curiosity rover at Yellowknife Bay, Mars, were derived from sources that evolved from an approximately average martian crustal composition to one influenced by alkaline basalts. No evidence of chemical weathering is preserved, indicating arid, possibly cold, paleoclimates and rapid erosion and deposition. The absence of predicted geochemical variations indicates that magnetite and phyllosilicates formed by diagenesis under low-temperature, circumneutral pH, rock-dominated aqueous conditions. Analyses of diagenetic features (including concretions, raised ridges, and fractures) at high spatial resolution indicate that they are composed of iron- and halogen-rich components, magnesium-iron-chlorine–rich components, and hydrated calcium sulfates, respectively. Composition of a cross-cutting dike-like feature is consistent with sedimentary intrusion. The geochemistry of these sedimentary rocks provides further evidence for diverse depositional and diagenetic sedimentary environments during the early history of Mars.

The heat capacity of solid C60

Abstract High resolution heat capacity measurements of the prototypic fullerene, C60, are presented between 13 and 300 K. The well-documented first-order phase transition is clearly observed at 257.6 K and is associated with enthalpy and entropy changes of 7.54 and 30.0 J K−1 mol−1, respectively. A more subtle transition is observed at 86.8 K. This transition is attributable to the onset of orientational glass behaviour related to the kinetics of molecular reorientation. The rate of the enthalpy relaxation at the glass transition is accurately reproduced by a simple exponential function. The Arrhenius parameters describing the temperature dependence of the relaxation time are Ea = 22.2 ± 1.0 kJ mol−1 and τ0 = 4×10−11±1s. At low temperatures, solid C60 is a glassy crystal in which molecular orientational disorder is frozen in as a consequence of the long relaxation time of the molecular reorientation.

Laser measurement of intensity ratio anomalies in principal series doublets of caesium Rydberg states: does the D1 line vanish?

The authors have measured the anomalous ratio of the oscillator strengths in the principal series doublet lines of caesium for quantum numbers n=18 to 30. The light of a frequency-doubled tunable pulsed laser was absorbed by an atomic beam of caesium and the resonances were detected by the very sensitive field ionisation method. The results show a regular increase of the ratio rho of the D2 over D1 line strengths as a function of n. rho values in excess of 103 are obtained for n around 30. However, the analysis of the data rules out the possibility of a pole for rho (i.e. a disappearance of the D1 line) in the discrete spectrum. This experiment is in very good agreement with recent theoretical calculations.

Quantum fluctuations in a two-mode parametric oscillator

We describe how a two-mode, above-threshold, optical parametric oscillator can generate nonclassical states of light with a large average number of photons: the fluctuation spectrum of the various fields is calculated, and several quantities are shown to have squeezed fluctuations. In particular, a perfect quantum noise suppression is predicted on the difference between the intensities of the two generated beams. We describe an experiment designed to demonstrate such an effect and show how it can be used to generate high-intensity amplitude-squeezed states.

Wavelength-multiplexed quantum networks with ultrafast frequency combs

Single-step fabrication of a multimode quantum resource from the parametric downconversion of femtosecond frequency combs is demonstrated. Each of the 511 possible bipartitions among ten spectral regions is shown to be entangled. Furthermore, an eigenmode decomposition reveals that eight independent quantum channels (qumodes) are subsumed within the comb.

Surpassing the Standard Quantum Limit for Optical Imaging Using Nonclassical Multimode Light

Using continuous wave superposition of spatial modes, we demonstrate experimentally displacement measurement of a light beam below the standard quantum limit. Multimode squeezed light is obtained by mixing a vacuum squeezed beam and a coherent beam that are spatially orthogonal. Although the resultant beam is not squeezed, it is shown to have strong internal spatial correlations. We show that the position of such a light beam can be measured using a split detector with an increased precision compared to a classical beam. This method can be used to improve the sensitivity of small displacement measurements.

PHOTOPHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF THREE METHANOFULLERENE DERIVATIVES

The three [6,6]-ring bridged methanofullerenes 1, 2, and 3 were synthesized; their ground-state absorption spectra in toluene and cyclohexane solutions are presented and possible assignments discussed. Although these three molecules are very different, they have very similar triplet–triplet spectra and near-unity values for the quantum yield for O2(1Δg) production by energy transfer from the triplet states, implying that the quantum yield of triplet production is approximately 1.

Generation and characterization of multimode quantum frequency combs

Multimode nonclassical states of light are an essential resource in quantum computation with continuous variables [1]. They can be generated either by mixing different squeezed light sources using linear optical operations [2], or directly in a multimode optical device [3, 4]. Synchronously Pumped Optical Parametric Oscillators (SPOPO) — which correspond to an OPO pumped by a train of ultrashort pulses that are synchronized with the cavity round-trip time — have been theoretically shown to be promising devices for the generation of multimode nonclassical frequency combs, since a SPOPO is a sole optical cavity acting as an assembly of independent squeezers in a particular basis called the supermodes basis [5]. The supermodes are optical frequency combs with specific spectrum and phase profiles that are determined by the length of the intracavity nonlinear crystal and the pulse shape of the pump.

Direct production of tripartite pump-signal-idler entanglement in the above-threshold optical parametric oscillator

We calculate the quantum correlations existing among the three output fields (pump, signal, and idler) of a triply resonant nondegenerate optical parametric oscillator operating above threshold. By applying the standard criteria [P. van Loock and A. Furusawa, Phys. Rev. A 67, 052315 (2003)], we show that strong tripartite continuous-variable entanglement is present in this well-known and simple system. Furthermore, since the entanglement is generated directly from a nonlinear process, the three entangled fields can have very different frequencies, opening the way for multicolored quantum information networks.

Improvements in the observed intensity correlation of optical parametric oscillator twin beams

We report an observed quantum noise reduction of 86% (8.5 dB) near 3 MHz in the intensity difference between the twin beams generated by a nondegenerate type II optical parametric oscillator operating above threshold.