Alexandre Parriaux, researcher at the ICB laboratory, makes us discover his research studies

L’Expérimentarium

• Creation : BOUAYED Myriam, GUABSI Sarah, LEDUC Mylène, MOREL Ophélie
• Master 1 « Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication » option Médias, à l’université de Bourgogne.

A color comb to detect gases

With the « Solitons, Lasers and Optical Communications » (SLCO) research team in the Photonics department, Alexandre Parriaux is working on light and its properties. For this, he uses a special light, consisting of a set of different colors and without nuances. The latter can be represented schematically in the form of a comb and makes it possible to detect gases very quickly, which could be useful in the medical field.

Sunlight is made up of an infinite number of shades of the colors of the rainbow. This set of emitted colors is called a “continuous spectrum" of light. But there are also light sources made up of only one color: lasers.

By combining several lasers of different colors, we can create a light with a “discontinuous spectrum". When we represent this spectrum graphically, it has the shape of a comb. The researchers thus gave this light the name of “comb of colors". This very special light has many applications. Hundreds of physicists around the world are already using it, for example to detect gases very quickly.

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