Today REFIMEVE is listed by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI) as a new national research infrastructure, in the transverse field of time metrology, primarily attached to the field of Science and Engineering, and secondly to the field of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
REFIMEVE is based on the possibility to disseminate, via the optical fiber network of RENATER, the stability and accuracy of the national time-frequency references elaborated by SYRTE, to a wide scientific community of users. REFIMEVE is supported by the University Sorbonne Paris Nord, the Paris Observatory, PSL and the CNRS.

On a national scale, this dissemination is already effective on about 3000 km, from Lille to Marseille and from Paris to Besançon. REFIMEVE desserves about 15 laboratories and infrastructures, and will progressively expands to about 30 laboratories and research infrastructures (such as SOLEIL, CNES, IRAM, FEMTO-ST, CERN, ESRF, LOFAR/NenuFAR...) in a wide range of research fields. The LSM, which is also listed this year among the new research infrastructures, is already connected.

On the European scale REFIMEVE has three interconnections with our European neighbors and their national metrology institutes: with INRIM in Italy thanks to the LSM and the support of the University of Grenoble Alpes and the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, with the PTB in Germany thanks to the support of the University of Strasbourg and its Digital Department, and with the NPL in the United Kingdom with an interconnection to the Laboratory of Laser Physics of the University Sorbonne Paris Nord. A European structuring is in progress with the projects CLONETS and CLONETS-DS.

Many disciplinary fields will benefit from the dissemination of this frequency: time/frequency metrology and the opening to a new disciplinary field, chronometric geodesy, fundamental physics on Earth and in space, precision spectroscopy applied to the environment and atmospheric physics. In addition, this instrument and its associated technologies can be used to measure the Earth’s rotation or as an ultra-sensitive, long-range seismic sensor.

For more information:
www.refimeve.fr

contact:
Paul-Eric Pottie, deputy director, paul-eric.pottie@obspm.fr