On October 26th, 2011, Prof. Philippe Bouyer, visited Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics (WIPM, CAS), invited by Prof. ZHAN Mingsheng. Then he gave a talk on“Underground and airborne matter-wave inertial sensors: towards fundamental tests of gravitation”.
Prof. Philippe Bouyer is the director of the Laboratory for Photonics and Nanosciences in the University of Bordeaux. Now he is most interested in Bose-Einstein condensates in disorder potential, coherent atomic sources and atom lasers, Bose-Fermi mixture for atom interferometry. He also collaborates with the other research groups on atom interferometry, inertial sensors, atom interferometry in space and miniature atom sensors.
In his talk, Prof. Philippe Bouyer described that the matter-wave inertial sensing relied on the capability of manipulating the coherent wave nature of matter to build an interferometer and accurately measure a phase difference. This offered a breakthrough advance in accelerometers, gyroscope and gravimeter, for applications to inertial guidance, geode determinations, geophysics and metrology. The atom interferometer is also a excellent candidate for laboratory-based tests of weak equivalence principle test, the measurement of the gravitational red shift and detection of the gravitational wave. Recently, the group of Prof. Philippe Bouyer firstly realized the operation of an airborne quantum inertial sensor.The sensitivity was estimated to 0.3 mg while the vibration noise in the plane is 30 mg, which highlighted the promising applications to inertial navigation and Earth observation of the quantum inertial sensor.They also described the improvement of the quantum sensor sensitivity in weightlessness, and discussed the possibility to conduct airborne or space borne tests of the Universality of Free Fall with quantum objects. In addition, they also described a matter-wave laser based interferometric gravitational antenna (MIGA).
After the Lab. tour, Prof. Philippe Bouyer communicated with the researchers and graduate students of the atom interferometer group. His visit promoted the mutual understanding between two institutes, and based foundation for future cooperation.
