Alain Brillet (; born 30 March 1947) is a French physicist specialized in gravitational wave detectors.

Biography

Alain Brillet graduated from the

ESPCI Paris ESPCI Paris (officially the École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris, , ''The City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution'') is a grande école founded in 1882 by the city of ...

in 1970, following which he worked for the

CNRS The French National Centre for Scientific Research (, , CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,637 staff, including 11,137 tenured researchers, 13,415 eng ...

Orsay Orsay () is a Communes of France, commune in the Essonne Departments of France, department in Île-de-France in northern France. It is located in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France, from the Kilometre Zero, centre of Paris. A fortifie ...

during his Ph.D. thesis until 1976. He later worked in

Boulder In geology, a boulder (or rarely bowlder) is a rock fragment with size greater than in diameter. Smaller pieces are called cobbles and pebbles. While a boulder may be small enough to move or roll manually, others are extremely massive. In ...

with

John Hall John Hall may refer to: Academics * John Hall (NYU President) (fl. c. 1890), American academic * John A. Hall (born 1949), sociology professor at McGill University, Montreal * John F. Hall (1951–2023), professor of classics at Brigham Young Univ ...

, before returning to France in 1982. He is most famous for being one of the two fathers of the

Virgo interferometer The Virgo interferometer is a large-scale scientific instrument near Pisa, Italy, for detecting gravitational waves. The detector is a Michelson interferometer, which can detect the minuscule length variations in its two arms induced by the p ...

with

Adalberto Giazotto Adalberto Giazotto (1 February 1940 – 16 November 2017) was an Italian physicist. Born in Genoa to musicologist Remo Giazotto, Adalberto Giazotto earned his degree in physics from the Sapienza University of Rome. He helped design the Virgo in ...

, directing the consortium during its design and construction between 1989 and 2003. He was awarded the

Ampère Prize The Prix Ampère de l’Électricité de France is a scientific prize awarded annually by the French Academy of Sciences. Founded in 1974 in honor of André-Marie Ampère to celebrate his 200th birthday in 1975, the award is granted to one or mo ...

in 2016 and the CNRS Gold Medal in 2017 for his work on the Virgo detector.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brillet, Alain 1947 births 20th-century French physicists 21st-century French physicists Living people