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Seedless nonresonant gas-flow velocimetry with single-shot coherent Rayleigh-Brillouin scattering

Alexandros Gerakis*

Junhwi Bak† and Robert Randolph

Mikhail N. Shneider

  • Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, 08544 Princeton, New Jersey, USA

  • *Contact author: alexandros.gerakis@list.lu
  • †Present address: Hexium, Inc., Austin, Texas, USA.
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Phys. Rev. Applied 24, 064035 – Published 10 December, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/ktvb-mw8z

Abstract

We demonstrate neutral gas-flow velocimetry by exploiting the optical dipole forces exerted by precisely tailored high-intensity laser fields on polarizable particles, in the form of single-shot coherent Rayleigh-Brillouin scattering (CRBS). This enables mapping of the velocity distribution function of the particles in a single laser shot of approximately 200 ns duration, allowing us to perform spectroscopic measurements in the time, rather than the frequency, domain. Importantly, CRBS results in a coherent signal beam, which renders the technique ideal for measurements in optically noisy environments. By correlating the time shift of the resulting spectrum to the Doppler shift caused by the bulk motion of particles, we perform neutral gas-flow velocimetry without the need to seed the flow, nondestructively, for a variety of gases, atomic or molecular. We demonstrate gas-flow velocimetry at flow velocities as low as 1ms−1, with similar velocity resolution, while temperature and gas density can also be estimated from the same single-shot spectra. To prove the effectiveness of the measurement technique, we benchmark it against Pitot tube measurements, which show excellent agreement.

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Phys. Rev. Applied 24, 064035– Published 10 December, 2025
  • Received 23 April 2025
  • Revised 28 September 2025
  • Accepted 27 October 2025
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