Alain Brillet - Médaille d'or 2017 du CNRS (CNRS/Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur)

Université Côte d’Azur researcher Alain Brillet, a pioneer in laser instrumentation and a founding member of the Virgo network that participated in the 2016 discovery of gravitational waves, has been awarded the 2017 Gold Medal from the CNRS. This prestigious prize, created in 1937, is awarded each year to one or at most two internationally renowned French scientists for having made extraordinary advances in diverse scientific fields. This year, a second Medal was also awarded to the physicist Thibault Amour, for his theoretical work that played a decisive role in the analysis of data from the gravitational wave detectors. The announcement of the prize was made on the same day, September 27th, as the announcement of the first-ever three-detector observation of gravitational waves by the Virgo collaboration and their US-based LIGO partners. The initial discovery of gravitational waves was announced by the HUGO-Virgo collaboration in February of 2016, based on observations made in September 2015 from the twin LIGO detectors located in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. This latest discovery, based on observations made on August 14, 2017, also included observations made from the Advanced Virgo detector located near Pisa, Italy. As with the 2016 discovery, these new waves--distortions in space-time whose existence had been predicted by Einstein a century earlier—were the result of a merger between two black holes. The black holes, with masses of approximately 25 and 31 times that of the sun, are located about 1.8 light years from the Earth. With the addition of the Advanced Virgo detector, the three-detector observation allowed an unprecedented view of the gravitational waves, permitting the researchers to narrow down the source of the waves with an order of magnitude greater precision and providing new insights into the nature of their polarization. The work has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters. Alain Brillet Dr. Brillet, a pioneer in the metrology of laser instrumentation, played a visionary role in the development of the large interferometers that led to the detection of gravitational waves. Long interested in lasers stabilized to atomic or molecular references, Brillet started his career at the Horloge Atomique before doing a post-doctoral stint with John Hall (2005 Nobel Prize in Physics) in Boulder, Colorado, where he set up an improved version of the Michelson-Morley experiment that established his reputation and whose results are still frequently cited today. Following his post-doctoral work, Brillet returned to France to become a CNRS Senior Researcher. He is currently an Emeritus Senior Research at the CNRS and a member of the Artemis laboratory (Université Côte d’Azur). Dr. Brillet understood as early as the 1980’s that no physical laws would prevent the potential detection of kilometer-long gravitational waves through the use of interferometers. He was able to convince other scientists working on instrumentation or on gravity to pursue this adventure with him, leading to the design and development of the original Virgo detector. While his colleague Adalberto Giazotto developed suspension systems to allow mirrors to be uncoupled from terrestrial vibrations, Brillet developed innovative solutions in the fields of lasers and optics. The collaborative French-Italian project based on the new instrument was submitted to the French CNRS and Italian INFN in 1989, and following its approval Brillet became its first leader, a role he maintained until 2003. Since 2008, Brillet has focused on the design of the optics and laser system of the next-generation Advanced Virgo detector, which went online on August 1st, 2017 and which played a role in the discovery announced this week. The quality of Brillet’s work was instrumental in the consolidation of the collaboration between LIGO and Virgo, initially through a data sharing agreement and more recently on the joint detection of the waves. Brillet has been a co-author on all of the publications of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration. In addition to the CNRS Gold Medal, Brillet has received the 2016 Ampère Prize from the French Academy of Sciences, the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (as a member of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration), and is a Knight of the French Legion of Honor (2005).