Photonic doppler velocimetry in shock physics experiments

Doppler velocimetry techniques are frequently used in Shock-Physics experiments to measure material velocities (as a function of time). With such diagnostics, there is no physical contact between the probe and the target, which presents the advantage of not intruding the observed phenomenon. They also provide very good precision on the velocities. Those techniques are either based on homodyne methods (such as Fabry-Perot and Visar) or on heterodyne methods (such as PDV-Photon Doppler Velocimetry). In particular, PDV technique has recently been developed at LLNL. We present in this paper a PDV system built at CEA DIF, along with our first experimental results which we obtained on a shock tube.