Alain Brillet

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Alain Brillet, 2017

Alain Brillet (* 30th March 1947 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye ) is a French physicist who with laser - interferometers as gravitational wave detectors concerned.

Brillet studied at the École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris (ESPCI) with a diploma in 1970 and then conducted research for the CNRS . He was at the laboratory for atomic clocks in Orsay and received his doctorate in 1976. As a post-graduate student , he was with John L. Hall in Boulder, Colorado. On his return, he became director of research at the CNRS in 1982.

He is now retired research director of the CNRS at the Artemis Laboratory of the CNRS, the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis and the University of the Cote d'Azur. The Artemis Laboratory is involved in Virgo and LISA . In the 1980s he was one of the initiators and then head (or co-head) of Virgo, whose construction in Cascina near Pisa he supervised from 1993 to 2003. Brillet also suggested the name of this Franco-Italian project. Among other things, Brillet developed the vibration-free suspension of the mirrors with his Italian colleague Adalberto Giazotto (who was also the head of the project on the Italian side). From 2008 he developed second generation laser systems for Advanced Virgo. With Virgo he was also involved in the LIGO collaboration, which achieved the first direct gravitational wave detection in 2015.

Before researching gravitational wave detectors, he worked on atomic clocks and frequency-stabilized lasers. As a post-doctoral student, he carried out a modern (resonator) version of the Michelson-Morley experiment with Hall in 1979 , which until then gave the best values ​​for the isotropy of the speed of light (and was not exceeded for over 25 years after that).

For 2017 he received the Médaille d'or du CNRS . He also received the Prix ​​Ampère in 2016 and the Edison Volta Prize in 2018 .

In 2005 he became a Knight of the Legion of Honor .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Brillet, Hall, Improved laser test of the isotropy of space. In: Phys. Rev. Lett. 42, 1979, pp. 549-552
  2. ↑ CNRS press release, September 27, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Brillet, Alain
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 30, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Saint-Germain-en-Laye