Free flight determination of boundary layer transition on small scale cones in the presence of surface ablation

To assess the possibility of achieving extensive laminar flow on conical vehicles during hyperbolic entry, the Ames Research Center has had an ongoing program to study boundary-layer transition on ablating cones. Boundary layer transition results are presented from ballistic range experiments with models that ablated at dimensionless mass transfer rates comparable to those expected for full scale flight at speeds up to 17 km/sec. It was found possible to measure the surface recession and hence more accurately identify regions of laminar, transitional, and turbulent flow along generators of the recovered cones. Some preliminary results using this technique are presented

Optical frequency comb generation from a monolithic microresonator

Optical frequency combs provide equidistant frequency markers in the infrared, visible and ultra-violet and can link an unknown optical frequency to a radio or microwave frequency reference. Since their inception frequency combs have triggered major advances in optical frequency metrology and precision measurements and in applications such as broadband laser-based gas sensing8 and molecular fingerprinting. Early work generated frequency combs by intra-cavity phase modulation while to date frequency combs are generated utilizing the comb-like mode structure of mode-locked lasers, whose repetition rate and carrier envelope phase can be stabilized. Here, we report an entirely novel approach in which equally spaced frequency markers are generated from a continuous wave (CW) pump laser of a known frequency interacting with the modes of a monolithic high-Q microresonator13 via the Kerr nonlinearity. The intrinsically broadband nature of parametric gain enables the generation of discrete comb modes over a 500 nm wide span (ca. 70 THz) around 1550 nm without relying on any external spectral broadening. Optical-heterodyne-based measurements reveal that cascaded parametric interactions give rise to an optical frequency comb, overcoming passive cavity dispersion. The uniformity of the mode spacing has been verified to within a relative experimental precision of 7.3*10(-18).Comment: Manuscript and Supplementary Informatio