Amphithéâtre Maurice Halbwachs, Site Marcelin Berthelot
Open to all
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Abstract

Optical frequency combs have revolutionized time and frequency metrology by providing rulers in frequency space that measure large optical frequency differences and/or straightforwardly link microwave and optical frequencies. Such combs enable precision laser spectroscopy, tests of fundamental physics and provide the long-missing clockwork mechanism for optical clocks.
While frequency combs have become key to research areas such as attosecond science, or calibration of astronomical spectrographs, one of the most successful applications beyond their original purpose has been dual-comb interferometry. An interferometer can be formed using two frequency combs of slightly different line spacing. Dual-comb interferometers without moving parts are fundamentally different from any other type of interferometers: they perform direct frequency measurements, without geometric limitations to resolution. They outperform state-of-the-art devices in an increasing number of fields including spectroscopy and three-dimensional imaging, offering unique features such as frequency measurements, accuracy, precision, speed. This talk will provide a short introduction to optical frequency combs and will survey dual-comb interferometry and its latest exciting developments.

Nathalie Picqué

Nathalie Picqué is a Director at the Max-Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (Berlin, Germany) and a Professor of Physics at the Humboldt University of Berlin. She has been previously a research group leader at the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany) and a tresearch scientist with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Orsay (France). She received her doctoral degree in Physics from Université Paris-Saclay (France) in 1998. Her research interests are in the areas of optics and molecular physics, more particularly in interferometry, precision spectroscopy and laser technology. Her research focuses on exploring new ideas that involve laser frequency combs and on applying these novel concepts to metrology, molecular spectroscopy, holography and chip-scale sensing. Nathalie Picqué has received several awards, including the 2021 Gentner-Kastler Prize in Physics, a 2021 European Research Council Advanced Grant, the 2022 Breakthrough in Physical Sciences of the Falling-Walls Foundation and the 2023 Cécile DeWitt-Morette Prize of the French Academy of Sciences.

Speaker(s)

Nathalie Picqué

Max-Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy and Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany