Erik Kerstel

Professor of Physics

140 rue de la Physiqe

38402 Saint-Martin d’Heres

Director of Science and Educational affairs of the Grenoble University Space Center (CSUG)

Principal Investigator for Grenoble and acting Project Manager of the CSUG-IQOQI joint "NanoBob" cubesat (nano-satellite) mission.

Email: erik (dot) kerstel (at) univ-grenoble-alpes (dot) fr

Phone: +33 - 476 51 4337

Office: room 023

Office hours: by appointment

Teaching

Phy113b Optique (C/TD/TP; L1)

PAX6PHAK Traitement de Signal (C/TD/TP; L3)

PAX7PHAE Optique et Lasers (C/TD/TP; M1)

PAX7NQAD Optics (CM; M1)

Phy4232 Analyse et Traitement de Signal (C/TD/TP; M1)

Phy538C/PAX7GIAC Optical Spectroscopy (C; M2)

Phy548A Developpement Projet Stage (C/TD; M2)

Ecole Doctorale de Physique / Graduate School of Physics:

Experimental Methods in Atmospheric Monitoring (C)

Principles of Measurement Systems (C)

Curriculum Vitae

Erik Kerstel obtained an MSc in Physics (Cum Laude - with highest honors) from the Eindhoven University of Technology, where he wrote a thesis in the group of Herman Beijerinck on crossed molecular beam studies of the elastic interactions between metastable rare gas atoms and ground state atoms and molecules. He continued his education at Princeton University in the group of Giacinto Scoles (with close collaborations with Prof. Kevin Lehmann). In 1993 he obtained a PhD in Chemical Physics with a thesis titled "On The Vibrational Predissociation of Weakly Bound Complexes: Overtone and Double-Resonance Experiments".

From 1993 to 1995 was a post-doctoral fellow at the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy (LENS) in Florence, Italy. During this period he established the molecular beam research program, investigating the radiative and non-radiative behavior of electronically excited, small aromatic molecules in the UV and visible regions of the spectrum, using ultra high-resolution spectroscopic techniques.

In 1995 he moved to the Center for Isotope Research (CIO) of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He was awarded a 5-year Fellowship of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in 1997 and in 200 he was appointed as a tenured member of the Faculty of Physics. As such he headed the Stable Isotope Ratio Infrared Spectrometry Laboratory that developed the first water isotope ratio laser spectrometers. These were successfully applied in the fields of biomedicine, ice core research, and atmospheric research.

Following a one-year sabbatical at the J. Fourier University of Grenoble in 2009/2010, he accepted their offer of a full professorship (PR1) at the Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Physics. Erik has presented a large number of (invited) talks at universities and international conferences, and he has spent significant time in other research groups as a visiting scientist. He has been the (co-) organizer of a number of international meetings, including those of BASIS, isotope sessions at the EGU, the Stable Isotope Ratio Infrared Spectrometry (SIRIS) workshop series, and the Field Laser Applications in Industry and Research (FLAIR) conference series; Most recently organizing the FLAIR2016 conference in Aix-les-Bains. His current research interests include the development of ultra-sensitive laser-based stable isotope ratio analyzers for small molecules of environmental interest (such as water, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide), and their application in fields like ice-core research and atmospheric chemistry. He is also the PI for Grenoble of the "NanoBob" CubeSat project, a joint mission of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Vienna (group of Dr. Rupert Ursin) that aims to bring Quantum Communication to space on a nano-satellite platform, demonstrating global Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) in an uplink scenario. This work is carried within the Grenoble University Space Center (CSUG) and has more recently evolved toward the study of Quantum Information Networks with a Space component. As such we are part of the International Network in Space Quantum Technologies (INSQT) and the Federation QuantAlps.

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