Seminars

Contact :
Hèléne Berthoumieux
helene.berthoumieux (arobase) espci.psl.eu
Tel : +33 (0) 1 40 79 xx xx

Paddy Royall
paddy.royall (arobase) espci.fr
Tel : +33 (0) 1 40 79 xx xx

Map

Gulliver seminars take place on Mondays at 11:30 AM in the F304 room, and typically last one hour including questions. The seminars are in English, and the scientific topics are mainly those studied in the laboratory.







Seminar archive  (396)

  • 2024

  • 2023

    • Gulliver Seminar : Jörg Baschnagel (Institut Charles Sadron)
      Lundi 11 décembre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Charpak
      Correlations of stress fluctuations in glass-forming liquids
      Many fluids do not crystallize upon cooling, but form amorphous, glassy, solids at low temperature. As liquids, amorphous solids are on average isotropic so that static pair-correlation functions do not allow to distinguish between fluid and solid states. However, a distinction is possible under weak shear (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Jörg Baschnagel (Institut Charles Sadron)
      Lundi 11 décembre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Charpak
      Correlations of stress fluctuations in glass-forming liquids
      Many fluids do not crystallize upon cooling, but form amorphous, glassy, solids at low temperature. As liquids, amorphous solids are on average isotropic so that static pair-correlation functions do not allow to distinguish between fluid and solid states. However, a distinction is possible under weak shear (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Peter Olmsted (Georgetown University)
      Lundi 4 décembre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Charpak
      How does the glass transition temperature in polymers depend on molecular weight ?
      I present a study of the molecular weight dependence, M, of the glass transition Tg(M), xperimentally and with simple modeling. We find three regimes for T_g(M), roughly corresponding to (1) short inflexible oligomers, (2) oligomers with 2-20 or so Kuhn steps, and (3) polymeric molecules. We identify (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Peter Olmsted (Georgetown University)
      Lundi 4 décembre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Charpak
      How does the glass transition temperature in polymers depend on molecular weight ?
      I present a study of the molecular weight dependence, M, of the glass transition Tg(M), xperimentally and with simple modeling. We find three regimes for T_g(M), roughly corresponding to (1) short inflexible oligomers, (2) oligomers with 2-20 or so Kuhn steps, and (3) polymeric molecules. We identify (...)
    • Séminaire GULLIVER
      Lundi 27 novembre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Charpak
      Phase-Separated Droplets Swim to Their Dissolution
      Cells control vital bio-chemical processes by creating compartments with distinct compositions. In addition to the well-known membrane-bound organelles, such as the nucleus or chloroplasts, dynamic membraneless compartments formed through liquid-liquid phase separation have merged as important cellular (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Etienne Jambon-Puillet (LadHyX, Polytechnique)
      Lundi 27 novembre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Phase-Separated Droplets Swim to Their Dissolution
      Cells control vital bio-chemical processes by creating compartments with distinct compositions. In addition to the well-known membrane-bound organelles, such as the nucleus or chloroplasts, dynamic membraneless compartments formed through liquid-liquid phase separation have emerged as important cellular (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Suzanne Fielding (Durham University)
      Lundi 13 novembre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Delayed yielding of amorphous materials
      Amorphous solids include soft materials such as emulsions, foams, colloids, granular matter, and gels, as well as harder metallic and molecular glasses. In contrast to conventional crystalline solids, the internal arrangement of their constituent microstructures (emulsion droplets, foam bubbles, etc.) lacks any (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Karen Alim (Technische Universität München)
      Lundi 9 octobre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Lesson from smart slime : How active flow networks process information for complex behaviour
      Propagating, storing and processing information is key to take smart decisions – for organisms as well as for autonomous devices. In search for the minimal units that allow for complex behaviour the slime mould Physarum polycephalum stands out by solving complex optimization problems despite its simple make-up. (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Grzegorz Szamel (Colorado State University)
      Lundi 2 octobre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Active matter : stochastic single active particle engine and emergent behavior in many-particle systems
      I will present results pertaining to two very different active matter systems. First, I will show how a nonreciprocal coupling between an active particle's self-propulsion and position can be used to extract useful work from a single active particle maintained at constant temperature [1]. Second, I will discuss (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Dinis Luis (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
      Lundi 25 septembre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver Seminar : Noushine Shahidzadeh (University of Amsterdam)
      Lundi 18 septembre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver Seminar : Daniel Amor (ENS)
      Lundi 11 septembre 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver Seminar : Christian Wagner (Saarland University)
      Lundi 26 juin 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The physics of blood flow
      Blood is a complex fluid composed of red and white cells suspended in a protein solution called plasma. At low shear rates, red blood cells form aggregates, which are broken up at high shear rates, resulting in pronounced shear thinning. Nevertheless, in most medical simulations, blood is treated as a Newtonian (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Wilhelm Huck (Radboud University)
      Lundi 19 juin 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Self-organizing chemical reaction networks : from adaptation to reservoir computing
      The cell is arguably the most amazing material that exist. Inspired by its unique functions –homeostasis, sensing, adaptation, growth – we are exploring routes to construct synthetic systems that capture some of the complexity of living systems. Our focus is on complex networks of chemical reactions. In cells, they (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Glenn H. Fredrickson (University of California, Santa Barbara)
      Jeudi 1er juin 2023 de 15h00 à 16h00 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Computational Field Theory : From Polymers to Superfluids
      I will discuss a new approximation-free, finite-temperature method for simulating the equilibrium properties of many-boson systems. The technique involves a direct numerical attack on quantum field theories formulated in an imaginary time path integral representation using coherent states. We address the 'sign (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Lisa Tran (Utrecht University)
      Lundi 22 mai 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Controlling the self-assembly of molecular and colloidal liquid crystals
      Liquid crystals are the basis of the modern display industry because of their unique properties. Yet, liquid crystalline ordering can occur across length scales from nanometric, molecular assemblies to micron-sized colloids. Despite their wide applications, the structures that liquid crystals can form are yet to (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Jörg Baschnagel (Institut Charles Sadron)
      Lundi 15 mai 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver Seminar : Elena Govorun (Gulliver, ESPCI)
      Lundi 15 mai 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver Seminar : Axel Huerre (MSC, Université de Paris)
      Lundi 3 avril 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Freezing Soft Matter
      In this seminar I will discuss two examples where we experimentally studied the freezing behavior of soft materials. Our first object of interest will be an hydrogel. We will explore the effect of the presence of a polymer network in the dynamics of the freezing front. We'll also try to see whether the stress (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Yann Chalopin (Centrale-Supélec)
      Lundi 27 mars 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Localisation of thermal energy, topological disorder and the art of regulation in biochemistry
      This seminar proposes to address an atomic mechanism describing how part of the regulation of biochemistry emerges in proteins and protein assemblies. A physical description linking the topology of macromolecular complexes to their biochemical function will be exposed through dynamic effects arising from (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Jean-Loup Faulon (INRAE)
      Lundi 20 mars 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      In vitro and in vivo neural computations with metabolism
      Engineering information processing devices in living systems is a long-standing venture of synthetic biology. Yet, the problem of engineering devices that perform basic operations found in machine learning remains largely unexplored. I will first present the in vitro (cell-free) engineering of enzyme catalyzed (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Michel Fruchart (Gulliver, ESPCI)
      Lundi 13 mars 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Non-reciprocal phase transitions
      Out of equilibrium, a lack of reciprocity is the rule rather than the exception. Non-reciprocity occurs, for instance, in active matter, non-equilibrium systems, networks of neurons, social groups with conformist and contrarian members, directional interface growth phenomena and metamaterials. Although wave (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Malcolm Faers (Bayer)
      Lundi 13 février 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The Art of Applying Colloid Science to the Design of Crop Protection Formulations for Tomorrow's Technologies
      Designing formulations is a rewarding and fascinating but complex challenge, the final product must fulfil several different criteria such as performance, innovation, differentiation, safety, be registerable (globally), cost, sustainability, stability and be robust for manufacture for example. These criteria often (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Léonie Canet (Université Grenoble Alpes)
      Lundi 30 janvier 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality in exciton-polariton condensates
      Since the seminal paper by Kardar, Parisi and Zhang (KPZ) in 1986 on kinetic roughening of classical growing interfaces, the KPZ equation has arisen as a fundamental model in statistical physics for non-equilibrium scaling phenomena and phase transitions. Unexpectedly, it still unfolds new branching, such as a (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Yann Chalopin (Centrale-Supelec)
      Lundi 23 janvier 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Localisation of thermal energy, Topological disorder and the art of regulation in biochemistry
      This seminar proposes to address an atomic mechanism describing how part of the regulation of biochemistry emerges in proteins and protein assemblies. A physical description linking the topology of macromolecular complexes to their biochemical function will be exposed through dynamic effects arising from (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Laura Rodriguez Arriaga (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid)
      Lundi 16 janvier 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Rolling vesicles to model cell motion
      Vesicles, aqueous droplets stabilized by amphiphilic membranes, are largely used as models of biological membranes and as drug carriers. Their utility, however, depends critically on the degree of control achieved on vesicle properties in the fabrication process. In this talk, I will discuss the adequacy of (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Sylvain Gigan (ENS)
      Lundi 9 janvier 2023 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Light in complex media : imaging, computing, and optical forces
      Light propagation in complex media produces a well-known and universal interference pattern, called speckle. Our team has been interested in manipulating speckle patterns, by controlling the incident wavefront incident on the disordered material. I will show that this is particularly relevant for imaging, which is (...)
    • Séminaire SIMM/C3M/GULLIVER - Yaroslav V. Kudryavtsev
      Jeudi 5 janvier 2023 de 14h00 à 15h00 - Boreau
    • Séminaire SIMM/C3M/GULLIVER - Yaroslav V. Kudryavtsev
      Jeudi 5 janvier 2023 de 14h00 à 15h00 - Boreau
  • 2022

    • Gulliver Seminar : Elisabeth Agoritsas (EPFL)
      Lundi 12 décembre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Towards a unifying (mean-field) picture of driven disordered systems
      Amorphous materials are ubiquitous around us : emulsions as mayonnaise, foams, sandpiles or biological tissues are all structurally disordered. This has key implications for their mechanical, rheological and transport properties : statistically distributed from sample to sample, they stem from a microscopic (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Robert Pascal (Université Aix Marseille)
      Lundi 28 novembre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Connecting energy dissipation and biological evolution
      Building life from chemical components constitutes the main goal of synthetic biology. But it turns out that the mass of information gained in molecular biology since the discovery of the structure of nucleic acids is not sufficient to reach the goal of building a simple system reproducing features of life. A (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Christophe Josserand (LadHyX)
      Lundi 21 novembre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Freezing impacts
      Freezing flows are crucial in many different situations from plane icing to the formation of ice structures in nature. The complexity here comes from the coupling between the free surface hydrodynamics and the heat transfer. I will present and discuss in this talk how a drop impacting a cold surface can freeze and (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Mathias Fink (lnstitut Langevin, ESPCI)
      Lundi 14 novembre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Space-time metamaterials
      In this talk, I will present a pedagogical review of time-varying and space-time varying metamaterials. I will discuss the effects on wave propagation of modulating the refractive index of a material both in space and time. I will discuss various time and space-time modulation mechanisms and shows different (...)
    • SIMM-C3M-Gulliver joint Seminar : Elena Govorun
      Lundi 7 novembre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Statistics of polymer chains with unit sequences obtained via spatial patterns
      Design of polymer sequences is a tool to control macromolecular self-assembly for biopolymers and synthetic polymers. We consider the A and B monomer unit sequences created via the modification of polymers in a condensed state in accordance with the spatial positions of monomer units. The conformations of polymer (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Tanniemola Liverpool (University of Bristol)
      Jeudi 27 octobre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The mathematics of active matter
      A flock of birds, a shoal of fish, a swarm of robots, a colony of swimming bacteria ; these are examples of systems composed of interacting units that consume energy and collectively generate motion and mechanical forces on their environment. They show a rich variety of collective behaviour, much of which remains (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Ramin Golestanian (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft)
      Mardi 25 octobre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Self-organization via non-reciprocal interactions
      Broken action-reaction symmetry has been recently explored in active matter in the context of non-equilibrium phoretic interactions between catalytically active colloids and enzymes, and shown to lead formation of self-propelled active molecules that break time-reversal symmetry, oscillating active complexes that (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Francesco Zamponi (ENS)
      Lundi 17 octobre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Rough fitness landscapes : from protein evolution to protein design
      Rough (energy, or free energy, or fitness) landscapes are ubiquitous in disordered systems, from material science to biology. These landscapes feature a multitude of local energy minima, separated by barriers and transition paths, with highly heterogeneous properties. In this talk, I will discuss how rough fitness (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Hélène Berthoumieux (CNRS)
      Lundi 10 octobre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Electrostatic interactions at the nanoscale : development of continuous field theory
      How do charged objects solvated in nanoconfined aqueous solutions interact ? This question is of great interest as electrostatic interactions at the nanoscale are ubiquitous both in biology and in nanotechnology. However, at this scale, the dielectric permittivity of water is anomalously low and inhomogeneous and (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Matthieu Labousse (CNRS, ESPCI)
      Lundi 3 octobre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Soft violation of Bell's inequality
      Walking drops on Faraday waves are one of the rare examples of non-quantum wave-particle duality. A series of striking experiments with one walking drop has lead to behaviors that were thought to the peculiar to the quantum scale. I will introduce the system and will review the most striking experimental results (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Lydéric Bocquet (ENS)
      Lundi 26 septembre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Water flows in carbon nanochannels, from carbon memories to quantum friction
      The emerging field of nanofluidics explores the molecular mechanics of fluids. This world of infinitesimal fluidics is the frontier where the continuum of fluid dynamics meets the atomic nature of matter, or even its quantum nature. Nature fully exploits the fluidic oddities at the nanoscale and it is capable of (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Rami Pugatch (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
      Lundi 19 septembre 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A unifying autocatalytic network-based framework for bacterial growth laws
      Recently discovered simple quantitative relations, known as bacterial growth laws, hint at the existence of simple underlying principles at the heart of bacterial growth. In this talk, we explain our unifying picture of how these known relations, as well as new relations that we derive, all stem from a universal (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Frank Schreiber (Universität Tübingen)
      Mardi 13 septembre 2022 de 16h00 à 17h00 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A soft matter perspective of proteins : From phase behavior to dynamics
      Proteins are considered the machinery of life. They are an exciting subject of study for many branches of modern science and technology, from biology to medicine and pharmacy, but also in colloid science, chemical engineering and nanotechnology. In many cases, not only the behavior of individual proteins needs to (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Andrew B Croll (North Dakota State University)
      Lundi 11 juillet 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Crumpled Matter made from Sticky and Damaged Sheets
      he cause for the relatively high compressive strength of a crumpled sheet has long fascinated many researchers. When a sheet is confined in a spherical cavity it slowly bends and collides with itself until it becomes trapped in a complicated random state. Much research has focused on the geometry of the complex (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Thomas Machon (University of Bristol)
      Lundi 27 juin 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Contact geometry in cholesterics and chiral materials
      Chirality in materials, such as liquid crystals, often entails a high degree of frustration, leading to a rich array of morphological phenomena. Here I will discuss how methods from contact geometry and topology can be used to give a qualitative understanding of the behaviour of chiral materials. Using experiments (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Julia Yeomans (University of Oxford)
      Lundi 20 juin 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Active Matter : evading the decay to equilibrium
      Biological systems avoid equilibrium by taking chemical energy from their surroundings and using it to do work. Cells organise intra-cellular components into the structures that allow them to grow, reproduce and move. Tissues, collections of cells, differentiate locally as they develop to perform the complex (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Arezki Boudaoud (Ecole Polytechnique)
      Lundi 13 juin 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      On the biophysics of plant morphogenesis
      What sets the size and form of organisms is still, by large, an open question. During this talk, I will aim at a broad audience and illustrate how are addressing this question by using biophysical experiments and models applied to plant morphogenesis. On the one hand, measurements of cell internal pressure support (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Martin van Hecke (AMOLF, Univ. Leiden, Chaire Paris Science)
      Lundi 30 mai 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Pathways and Information in Complex Matter
      Collections of two-state hysteretic elements called hysterons describe the intricate pathways, hysteresis loops and memory effects observed in crumpled sheets and amorphous media. Such hysterons also naturally arise in many mechanical metamaterials and are then associated with buckling and snapping. Here we bridge (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Philipp Thomas (Imperial College)
      Lundi 23 mai 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Stochastic gene expression in growing cell populations
      Stochasticity in gene expression is an essential source of cell-to-cell variability (or noise) in clonal cell populations. So far, this phenomenon has been studied using the Gillespie Algorithm, or equivalently the Chemical Master Equation, which implicitly assumes that cells are independent and do neither grow (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Christian Ligoure (Université de montpellier)
      Lundi 16 mai 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Impact of Drops and beads under large biaxial deformation : the role of viscosity,capillarity and elasticity.
      We investigate freely expanding sheets formed by ultrasoft gel beads, and viscoelastic drops, produced by the impact of the bead or drop on a plate covered with a thin layer of liquid nitrogen that suppresses shear viscous dissipation thanks to an inverse Leidenfrost effect. The time evolution of the sheet is (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Philippe Nghe (CBI)
      Lundi 9 mai 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Could life start from collective dynamics in RNA reaction networks ?
      One of the main hypotheses in the origin of life is the 'RNA world' which surmises that RNA molecules were the primordial catalysts and information carriers, instead of proteins and DNA in life as we know it. We study this possibility experimentally and attempt to create RNA reaction networks that display (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Tanniemola Liverpool (University of Bristol)
      Lundi 4 avril 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver Seminar, Thomas Palberg (Mainz Universität)
      Lundi 28 mars 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Writing in Water
      Writing is an ancient cultural technique, typically performed by leaving some trace in or on a solid surface. We here explore the possibilities of leaving well formed letters in a liquid medium. We employ micron sized particles suspended in water as ink and ion exchange resin beads gravitationally settled to a (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Stephan Fauve (ENS-PSL)
      Lundi 21 mars 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT F3.04
    • Gulliver Seminar, Stéphane Lemaire (Sorbonne Université)
      Lundi 14 mars 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      DNA DRIVE : a new technology for sustainable data storage
      The storage of digital data is a major challenge in our modern societies. Current digital media stored in data centers are fragile, bulky and energy-intensive. The ongoing digital transformation of our societies requires a major disruption of our digital storage technologies. DNA data storage is an emerging (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Isabelle Cantat (Institut de Physique de Rennes)
      Lundi 7 mars 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Visco-elasticity of foam films
      Liquid foam exhibits surprisingly high viscosity, higher than each of its phases. This dissipation enhancement has been rationalized by invoking either a geometrical confinement of the shear in the liquid phase, or the influence of the interface viscosity. However, a precise localization of the dissipation, and (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Laura Filion (Utrecht University)
      Lundi 14 février 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Soft Matter meets Machine Learning : Using New Machine Learning Algorithms to Unravel Structural and Dynamical Features in Glassy Fluids
      Developments in machine learning have opened the door to fully new methods for studying phase transitions due to their ability to extremely efficiently identify complex patterns in systems of many particles. Applications of machine learning techniques vary from the use of developing new ML-based order parameters (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Marina Lévy (Sorbonne Université)
      Lundi 7 février 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Bringing fluid dynamics to life in the ocean
      No flow, no life. Without movement in the fluid, there would barely be any life in the ocean. Fluid movements allow the continuous supply of nutrients essential to photosynthesis in the sunlit layer of the ocean. This sustains microscopic phytoplankton, an immense biodiversity, and the entire marine food web. In (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Pierre Ronceray (CINAM)
      Lundi 31 janvier 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Elastically limited liquid-liquid phase separation inside cells
      Many intracellular bodies have been shown to be membrane-less liquid droplets that form through liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), both in the cytoplasm and in the nucleoplasm. In contrast to the archetypal oil-in-water demixing, the intracellular environment puts mechanical constraints to the formation of (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Antonin Eddi (ESPCI)
      Lundi 24 janvier 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A laboratory approach of Hydro-elastic waves
      Hydro-elastic waves (HEW) appear at very large scale in the marginal ice zone where the ocean is covered by a thin layer of ice. The physics of HEW is dominated by the bending elasticity of the thin sheet covering the liquid, but their propagation is much slower than plate (Lamb) waves thanks to the fluid inertia. (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Jasna Brujic (NYU)
      Lundi 10 janvier 2022 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Folding Made Easy
      The goal of self-assembly is to program particle interactions such that they aggregate into a unique architecture with a specific function. In biology, linear sequences of amino acids have evolved to spontaneously fold into well-defined protein geometries. In a system of much reduced complexity, we show an (...)
  • 2021

    • Gulliver Seminar, Anne Tanguy (Insa Lyon)
      Lundi 13 décembre 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Modelling the thermal and mechanical response of glasses, including different dissipation processes
      Glasses are disorderd materials, and thus their vibrational as well as thermal properties are very different from the crystal. In this context, it si important to revise the usual description of solids based on wave vector calculations. We will first discuss the characteristics of the normal modes in glasses and (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Raphaël Voituriez (Sorbonne Université)
      Lundi 6 décembre 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Quantifying memory effects in random search processes
      A general question that arises in random walk theory is the quantification of space exploration by a random walker. A key observable is provided by the first-passage time, which quantifies the kinetics of general target search problems, and as such has a broad range of applications from diffusion limited reactions (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Philippe Coussot (Laboratoire Navier)
      Lundi 18 octobre 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Imbibition-drying properties of wood controlled by bound water transport
      Water transfers (evaporation, humidification, sap flow) are fundamental in the life of natural materials such as plants or trees. Wood also constitutes a material of great interest for construction for its impact on thermal insulation and humidity regulation, but imbibition-drying cycles may induce damages (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Juliette Pierre (Institut Jean le Rond D'Alembert)
      Lundi 11 octobre 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Acoustic signature of hydrodynamics events
      Gas-liquid systems are ubiquitous in industrial, food, biological or geophysical contexts. The popping noise of a bursting bubble, the crackle sounds of ageing foams, the whistling of nucleating water, the fizzing of champagne, the drumming of rain and the thud of degassing volcano magmas evidence the radiation of (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Doron Grossman (Collège de France)
      Lundi 4 octobre 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Instabilities and geometry of growing tissues
      The vertex model is a discrete often used to described cellular media, where elastic energy depends on the difference of cells' actual area and perimeter from a reference values. Cells are allowed to change neighbors via different topological transition - including division, apoptosis and so - called T1 (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Paddy Royall (CNRS & ESPCI PSL)
      Lundi 27 septembre 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      "Controlling interactions in real space across the lengthscales : love, hate and criticality."
      Polymers, liquid crystals, surfactants, and colloidal dispersions form the four historic pillars of soft matter. For physicists, colloids were a relatively late entry into the field, driven in no small way by the seminal work of Peter Pusey and Bill van Megen in their experimental realisation of hard sphere phase (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Arezki Boudaoud (Ecole Polytechnique)
      Lundi 20 septembre 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The biophysics of plant morphogenesis
      What sets the size and form of organisms is still, by large, an open question. During this talk, I will aim at a broad audience and illustrate how are addressing this question by using biophysical experiments and models applied to plant morphogenesis. On the one hand, measurements of cell internal pressure support (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Hillel Aharoni (Weizman institute)
      Lundi 13 septembre 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      On wrinkles, and what they have to do with liquid crystals
      A thin elastic sheet attached to a soft substrate often develops wrinkle patterns when subject to an external forcing or as a result of geometric incompatibility. Such patterns appear spontaneously in a variety of natural systems, ranging from plant tissues to drying paint and from milk skin to human skin. The (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Claire Prada and Alexandre Delory (Institut Langevin)
      Lundi 6 septembre 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Zero group velocity and backward elastic guided modes in homogeneous media
      In elastic waveguides, the coupling between shear and compression waves results in complex dispersion effects. Indeed, negative phase velocity modes are observed in most waveguides like plates, tubes or ribbons. These modes, called 'backward', appear when two branches of neighbouring cut-off frequencies repel each (...)
    • Gulliver seminar, Daniel Hexner (Technion)
      Lundi 5 juillet 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Teaching an old foam new tricks : material design, memories and learning in aging solids
      Disordered solids are often out of equilibrium, evolving slowly as they age. The small incremental changes inherent in the aging process reduce the internal stresses through microscopic plastic deformations within the material. While often considered as merely a nuisance and detrimental to reliable material (...)
    • Séminaire Gulliver : Pedro Reis (EPFL)
      Lundi 28 juin 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Mechanics of rods and knots
      It used to be that academic seminars involved a researcher visiting a host institution to deliver a talk and meet with colleagues (do you remember those days ?!). Times have changed, at least temporarily, but this situation is also opening opportunities. In this 'talk', we will be inviting you for a virtual tour (...)
    • Gulliver seminar, Giulio Biroli (ENS)
      Lundi 21 juin 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      How amorphous materials yield under stress : a new kind of out of equilibrium phase transition
      I will show that a new kind of out of equilibrium phase transition is at the core of how amorphous solids yield in response to external deformations—a phenomenon that is crucial both for practical applications and for theoretical reasons. Such phase transition has strong connections with phenomena studied in the (...)
    • Gulliver seminar, Sarah Hormozi (Cornell University)
      Lundi 14 juin 2021 de 16h00 à 17h00 - En ligne
    • Gulliver seminar, Emmanuelle Rio (Université Paris Saclay)
      Lundi 7 juin 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Rupture of Foam Films and Surface Bubbles
      Surface bubbles are of crucial interest since they favour the transport of material from the bulk to the overlying atmosphere through the production of aerosols. This is important for example in climate models, air pollution studies or in the carbonated beverage industry since the produced aerosols contain most of (...)
    • Gulliver seminar, Giuseppe Pucci (CNR, University of Calabria)
      Lundi 31 mai 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Capillary surfers
      Active systems have recently attracted considerable interest for the possibility of extending statistical mechanics to incorporate non-equilibrium phenomena, as their constituents locally consume energy in order to move or exert forces on each other. There has been extensive work on dissipation and (...)
    • Gulliver seminar, Tamara Ben Ari (INRAE) and Olivier Berne (CNRS)
      Lundi 10 mai 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - ZOOM
      Labos 1point5 : reducing the environmental footprint of academic research
      Researchers have come to realize that research itself produces a carbon footprint. In the context of a global climate emergency, academia has a role in producing knowledge, teaching, and raising broad-based awareness about the issues - but not at the expense of exacerbating the underlying problems. In 2019, the (...)
    • Gulliver seminar, Thomas Gibaud (ENS Lyon)
      Lundi 3 mai 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Non-equilibrium colloidal suspensions
    • Gulliver seminar, Elsa Bayart (ENS Lyon)
      Lundi 12 avril 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver seminar, Wolfgang Liebermeister (INRA)
      Lundi 15 mars 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver seminar, Liesbeth Janssen (Eindhoven University)
      Lundi 8 mars 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver seminar, Romain Lhermerout (Liphy Grenoble)
      Lundi 1er mars 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • (Gulliver seminar) Jean-François Allemand (ENS)
      Lundi 1er février 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • (Gulliver seminar) Laurence Talini (CNRS/Saint-Gobain)
      Lundi 25 janvier 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver Seminar : Pascal Hersen, Institut Curie
      Lundi 18 janvier 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Cybergenetics : Real time control of gene expression and biological circuits
      Gene expression plays a central role in the orchestration of cellular processes. We recently developed an experimental platform for real-time, closed-loop control of gene expression that integrates microscopy for monitoring gene expression in live cells, microfluidics to manipulate the cells environment, and (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Mathieu Leocmach, ILM Lyon
      Lundi 4 janvier 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Active glass & polycrystal : ergodicity breaking dramatically affects response to self-propulsion
      We study experimentally a sediment of self-propelled Brownian particles with densities ranging from dilute to ergodic supercooled to nonergodic glass, to nonergodic polycrystal. We observe a dramatic slowdown of relaxation of nonergodic states when particles become weakly self-propelled. By contrast, ergodic (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Sven Panke, ETH Zürich
      Lundi 4 janvier 2021 de 11h30 à 12h30
      From searching for the needle in the haystack to searching the haystack
      Directed evolution - the interplay of generating diversity and selecting the fittest variant for a possible next round of diversification - has been a major engine for the advancement of biotechnology from the first days until today. Two processes had recently major influences on the intensity with which we can (...)
  • 2020

    • Gulliver Seminar : Udo Seifert, University of Stuttgart
      Lundi 14 décembre 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      The thermodynamic uncertainty relation
      The thermodynamic uncertainty relation discovered in 2015 is arguably one of the most promising insights arising from stochastic thermodynamics. It relates the mean and fluctuations of any current to the overall entropy production in a non-equilibrium steady state. It provides a lower bound on the inevitable cost (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Prerna Sharma, IIT Bangalore
      Lundi 30 novembre 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Internal friction controls active ciliary oscillations near the instability threshold
      Active filaments are prototypical engines of motility at the micron scale. Their motion in viscous fluids is determined by the balance of external drag and internal structural stress. The latter contains both active and passive components that, respectively, excite and relax motion. Knowledge of the passive (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Corinna Maass, (Max Planck)
      Lundi 23 novembre 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Chemotactic and autochemotactic effects in self-propelling droplets
      Artificial microswimmers are an emerging field of research, attracting interest as testing beds for physical theories of complex biological entities, as inspiration for the design of smart materials, and for the sheer elegance, and often quite counterintuitive phenomena of experimental nonlinear dynamics. (...)
    • Andrea Puglisi (University La sapienza)
      Lundi 16 novembre 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Short and long-range order in the velocity field of dense granular systems
      I will start with an introduction to the physics of granular and active systems, discussing interesting phenomena and applications, and suggesting qualitative analogies between these two families of systems. Then I will describe a recent experiment where a rotating probe, immersed in a vibro-fluidized dense 3d (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Ignacio Pagonabarraga (EPFL)
      Lundi 9 novembre 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Self assembly and phase transitions in intrinsically out of equilibrium systems
      Flocks of birds, schools of fishes, or bacterial colonies constitute examples of living systems that coordinate their motion. In all these systems their constituent elements generate motion due to energy consumption and can exchange information or react sensitively to chemical cues in order to move together or to (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Sabine Klapp (TU Berlin)
      Lundi 2 novembre 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Dynamical self-assembly and large-scale ordering in anisotropic active fluids
      Ensembles of active anisotropic particles can exhibit intriguing collective behaviours. In my talk I will discuss two phenomena in this area occurring on different length scales. The first part concerns the formation of large-scale patterns, particularly vortex formation and so-called mesoscale turbulence. Here I (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Niko Hildebrandt (Université de Rouen)
      Lundi 5 octobre 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
    • Gulliver Seminar : Yvette Tran (SIMM, ESPCI)
      Lundi 28 septembre 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Responsive hydrogel thin films : design and functionalities
      Surface-attached hydrogel films are actual novel alternative to brushes and layer-by-layer assemblies as polymer thin layers. We have recently developed a simple and versatile approach to synthesize reliable and reproducible films with thickness widely ranging from a few nanometers to several micrometers. (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Giuseppe Foffi (Paris Saclay University)
      Lundi 21 septembre 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Slowing down supercooled liquids by manipulating their local structure
      How do we design particles with interactions capable of inducing a more efficient glassy dynamics in supercooled liquids ? While it is well understood that glassy dynamics are accompanied by the emergence of long-lived locally favoured structures (1,2), it is not clear how the such structures can be designed to (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Jerôme Bonnet (CBS Montpellier)
      Lundi 14 septembre 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Reprogramming bacteria to detect diseases
      Engineered bacteria promise to revolutionize diagnostics, therapeutics, or environmental remediation. Yet, many applications are precluded by the limited number of detectable signals. Here I will present our efforts to design a synthetic receptor platform enabling bacteria to respond to novel ligands. These (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar : Alexandre Vilquin (Gulliver, ESPCI)
      Lundi 7 septembre 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
    • Gulliver Seminar : Ilham Maimouni & Maria Russo (IPGG, ESPCI)
      Lundi 29 juin 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Polymer foams by using microfluidics
    • Gulliver Seminar : VIncent Demery (Gulliver lab)
      Lundi 15 juin 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Anomalous pair correlations in non-equilibrium fluids
    • Gulliver Seminar Michel Cloitre ( ESPCI Paris)
      Lundi 8 juin 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Particle-scale rheology of soft amorphous solids
    • Gulliver Seminar : Kunihiko Kaneko (Tokyo University)
      Lundi 25 mai 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30
      Multi-level Evolution, Origin of Central Dogma, and Minority Control
      Biological systems are hierarchical : cells consist of molecules, multi-cellular organisms consist of cells, ecosystem consists of organisms. How such multi-level systems reproduce themselves and evolve with bioinformation emerged therein are basic questions to be solved.  Here, we consider multi-level evolution of (...)
    • Gulliver seminar, Pierre Soulard (ESPCI)
      Lundi 18 mai 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Rearrangement of a droplets cluster under compression : from crystal to glass
      A crystal and a glass are different at a molecular level which leads to strong consequences at the macroscopic scale, [1] [2]. We have developed an ideal experimental system to model such struc- tures. The 2D clusters are made of an emulsion of lightly attractive, stabilized oil droplets (of radius R ∼ 10μm) in (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Rémi Mérindol (Université de Montpellier)
      Lundi 27 avril 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver seminar, Stéphane Dorbolo (Université de Liège)
      Lundi 9 mars 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Leidenfrost is not only in a pan
      A droplet that is released on a hot pan is extremely mobile. Like the famous hovercraft, the droplet levitates on a gas cushion. In the case of the droplet, the gas is its own vapour. Indeed, the so-called Leidenfrost effect results of the liquid-gas transition. However, the temperature of the pan has to be much (...)
    • Gulliver seminar, Anke Lindner (ESPCI Paris)
      Lundi 27 janvier 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Morphological transitions of flexible Brownian fibers in interaction with viscous flows
      In this presentation we discuss the individual dynamics of flexible and Brownian filaments under shear and compression. We use actin filaments as a model system and observe their dynamics in microfluidic flow geometries using fluorescent labelling techniques and microscopic tracking methods. Our experimental (...)
    • Gulliver seminar, Antoire Nigues (ENS)
      Lundi 20 janvier 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Bridging the gap between nano and macro force measurement
      Phase changing materials are systems that undergo to phase transition when a critical parameter crosses the threshold value. Interesting examples of mechanical phase changing materials can be found at very different scales ranging from atomic scale metallic wires to ionic liquids and even snow and ice. (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar Gilles Tarjus (Sorbonne University)
      Lundi 6 janvier 2020 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Disorder and fluctuations in the yielding transition of amorphous solids under strain
      When slowly deformed at low temperature from an initial quiescent state, amorphous solids yield beyond some finite level of applied strain and reach a steady state characterized by plastic flow. The way yielding takes place is classified in two main categories : the “brittle” extreme where the sample (...)
  • 2019

    • Gulliver Seminar Michael Benzaquen (Ecole Polytechnique)
      Lundi 16 décembre 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Confidence Collapse in Macroeconomic Systems
      Despite their inability to cope with the Global Financial Crisis and various subsequent calls to "Rebuild Macroeconomics", Dynamics Stochastic General equilibrium (DSGE) models are still at the forefront of monetary policy around the world. Like many standard economic models, DSGE models rely on the figment of (...)
    • Seminar Gulliver, José Bico (ESPCI)
      Lundi 2 décembre 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Challenging Gauss theorem ?
      Cartographers have early realized that it is impossible to draw a flat map of the Earth without deforming continents. Gauss later generalized this geometrical constrain in his Theorema Egregium. Nevertheless, Nature commonly challenges this remarkable theorem : leaves or petals may develop into very complex shapes (...)
    • Seminar Gulliver, Laurent Courbin (Université de Rennes 1)
      Lundi 25 novembre 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Shaping fluid-fluid interfaces : Bubbles formed by blowing on soap films and mazes created by evaporating drops in porous media
      Thin liquid films have been studied extensively over the centuries as they impact a wide range of phenomena, in physics, chemistry and engineering. We will present two experiments in which we study the creation, stability and rupture of such fluid structures. Firstly, we discuss the formation of soap bubbles by (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar Ulrich Gerland (Technische Universität München)
      Lundi 18 novembre 2019 de 11h00 à 12h00 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      How can non-equilibrium physics enhance biochemical reactions ?
      This question comes up in different contexts, ranging from molecular scenarios for the spontaneous emergence of life in prebiotic worlds, to the design of artificial molecular systems with "life-like" properties. Biochemical reactions form the basis for the dynamics of these systems, but key features of their (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar Osvanny Ramos (University Claude Bernard Lyon))
      Lundi 4 novembre 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Towards reliable analogue experiments of earthquakes
      Finding reliable model experiments capable of properly simplifying the huge complexity of earthquakes is maybe the only way to capture the essential ingredients of their dynamics ; and a considerable number of experiments have tried to follow this path, by mimicking the behaviour of earthquakes. Two main (...)
    • Gulliver : Hadrien Vroylandt (Northwestern Univ)
      Jeudi 31 octobre 2019 de 16h00 à 17h00 - F306
    • Tommaso Fraccia (IPGG, ESPCI Paris)
      Lundi 14 octobre 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Soft Matter for the Origin of Life : Liquid Crystals, Phase Transitions and the Prebiotic Emergence of Biopolymers
      The abiotic formation of biopolymers from their monomeric building blocks and the emergence of cellular structures are still unsolved problems in the origin of life investigation. In this frame soft matter concepts of self-assembly, collective ordering and phase transitions can give an outstanding contribution, (...)
    • Séminaire PCT Kranthi Mandadapu, University of California Berkeley
      Jeudi 10 octobre 2019 de 16h00 à 17h00 - F306
    • Björn Högberg (Karolinska Institutet)
      Lundi 30 septembre 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      DNA origami and how we use it to understand biology
      It is widely accepted that the biophysical context of ligands and receptors has a significant impact on downstream signaling, however the concept is poorly understood due to difficulties in controlling and analyzing the microenvironment on the nanoscale. I will talk about how we think that DNA-nanotechnology can (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar Ana-Suncana Smith (Friedrich-Alexander Universitat)
      Lundi 23 septembre 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The physics of force-based microswimmers
      As paradigmatic systems of active matter, self-propelled microswimmers came recently in focus of numerous theoretical and experimental studies in the field of fluid dynamics at low Reynolds numbers. Most models are based on the pre-defined stroke exhibited by device. However, such approaches underestimate the role (...)
    • Séminaire Gulliver : Lydia Bourouiba (MIT)
      Lundi 9 septembre 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Unsteady fluid fragmentation
      Despite the complexity and diversity of modes of unsteady fluid fragmentation into secondary droplets, universality across geometry and fluid systems emerges. We discuss the role of unsteadiness in shaping a ubiquitous, yet neglected class of fluid fragmentation problems based on recent joint experimental and (...)
    • Tuomas Knowles (Cambridge University)
      Lundi 1er juillet 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Probing proteins in small volumes
      This talk outlines our efforts on exploring experimental strategies to provide a new window into protein self-assembly that are enabled by operation in small volumes. We have shown that microconfinement achieved through droplet microfluidics allows the isolation of single nucleation events in protein aggregation (...)
    • Naomi Oppenheimer (Tel Aviv University)
      Lundi 24 juin 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Membrane Hydrodynamics and Their Role on Protein Interactions
      Vast research has been devoted to studying the equilibrium properties of membranes as elastic surfaces. Much less attention has been given to their in-plane dynamics, which is crucial for protein function. In this talk, I will describe the basics of membrane hydrodynamics and give a few implications of the results (...)
    • Francesc Sagues (Paris Science Chair and Universitat de Barcelona)
      Lundi 17 juin 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Driven nematic colloids : From anomalous diffusion to dynamic self-assembly
      Colloids dispersed in nematic liquid crystals are conventionally studied in equilibrium, where elastic interactions coming from the distortion of the nematic matrix are dominant. Here we consider driven nematic colloids both from individual and collective perspectives. Driving mechanism is mostly based on a (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar Sophie Ramananarivo (LadHyX)
      Lundi 3 juin 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Emergent order, from colloidal crystals to fish schools
      Living systems constantly exploit active fluctuations in their processes, to boost transport or assist assembly. Self-propelled colloids, that consume energy to move hold the same potential for man-made assembly of microparticles. We show here that introducing a small amount of microswimmers in a monolayer of (...)
    • Matthieu Thomas (LNE)
      Lundi 20 mai 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      New kilogram definition in the revised SI
      The seven base units of the SI (Systeme International d'unites) will be defined on May 20, 2019 by reference to fixed and exact values of defining constants following after 30 years of progress in quantum physics. In particular, the kilogram will be defined from the Planck constant h, allowing weaknesses of the (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Marianne Clausel (Institut Elie Cartan, Univ. Lorraine)
      Lundi 13 mai 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Decision Tree for uncertainty measures
      The ensemble methods are popular machine learning techniques which are powerful when one wants to deal with both classification or prediction problems. A set of classifiers is constructed, and the classification or the prediction of a new data instance is done by tacking a weighted vote. These classifiers can be (...)
    • Seminar Gulliver and Total Chair, Joseph Paulsen (Syracuse Univ.)
      Lundi 6 mai 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Steve Donaldson (ENS)
      Lundi 15 avril 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Gulliver Seminar, Ludovic Jullien (ENS and PSL Univ)
      Lundi 8 avril 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A few thoughts about observables and their developments in fluorescence bioimaging
      Living matter provides major challenges for modelling. One avenue concerns defining a level of description, which can be experimentally addressed. The question of the observables is crucial with respect to this issue. In this lecture, I will recapitulate the state-of-the-art of the relevant observables, which have (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar, Jean-Christophe Baret (Bordeaux University)
      Lundi 1er avril 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Seminar Gulliver, Nicolas Vandewalle (Liege University)
      Lundi 25 mars 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Exploiting magnetocapillary interactions for swimming along liquid interfaces
      When soft ferromagnetic particles are suspended at air-water interfaces in the presence of a vertical magnetic field, dipole-dipole repulsion competes with capillary attraction such that 2d structures self-assemble. The complex arrangements of such floating bodies are emphasized. The equilibrium distance between (...)
    • Seminar Gulliver, Surajit Sengupta (TIFR Hyderabad)
      Lundi 18 mars 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The thermodynamic origin of solid rigidity
      School textbooks tell us that the main difference between a solid and a liquid is the ability of the former to retain its shape. Any attempt at changing the shape of a solid is resisted by an internal elastic stress, unless the deformation crosses a limiting value ; at which point the solid fails. This naive (...)
    • Alvaro Cassinelli, (PSL chair and City Univ. of Hong Kong)
      Lundi 11 mars 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Seminar Gulliver, Hugues Chaté (SPEC CEA Saclay)
      Lundi 11 février 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Seminar Gulliver, Scott Waitukaitis (AMOLF and IST Austria)
      Lundi 4 février 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The Leidenfrost Effect and Hydrogels
      The Leidenfrost effect occurs when an object near a hot surface vaporizes rapidly enough to lift itself up and hover. Although well-understood for liquids and stiff sublimable solids, little is known about the interaction of vaporizable soft solids with superheated surfaces. In this talk, I will introduce a new (...)
    • Seminar Gulliver, Philippe Brunet (Paris Diderot University)
      Lundi 28 janvier 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Light-controlled flows in active fluids
      We generate bio-convection flows in a suspension of phototactic and motile micro-algae Chlamydomonas Reinardthii, via a laser beam excitation. The denser micro-algae concentrate around the laser spot and, as a result of an increase of the local fluid density, generate bio-convection cells, which spatial range is (...)
    • Seminar Gulliver, Olli Ikkala (Aalto University)
      Lundi 21 janvier 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Programming materials with classical conditioning algorithms
      There exists a growing need for adaptive functional materials. Could materials showing a response to a particular stimulus become responsive to another stimulus to which they are originally indifferent ? Such behavior would mimic classical Pavlovian conditioning in behavioral psychology, one of the elementary (...)
    • Seminar Gulliver, Luca Giomi (Leiden University)
      Lundi 14 janvier 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The geometry of colonization
      Bacteria are among the most common and resilient forms of life on Earth, and their extraordinary surface-colonizing ability represents a central topic in microbiology, biophysics, and materials science. This process typically starts with few cells undergoing a phenotypical switch from the plantonik (i.e. swimming) (...)
    • Seminar Gulliver, Rodolphe Vuilleumier (ENS)
      Lundi 7 janvier 2019 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      First-principle molecular dynamics simulations of fluids of geological interest
      Molecular dynamics simulations allow to describe matter at the atomic scale of systems as diverse as liquids, biomolecules, porous solids, etc. In this field, first-principle simulations are based on forces computed at each time step from an electronic structure calculation. This is ideally suited for simulatting (...)
  • 2018

    • Seminar Gulliver, Satya Majumdar (University Paris Sud)
      Lundi 17 décembre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Active brownian motion in two dimensions
      We study the dynamics of a single active Brownian particle (ABP) in two dimensions. At late times, the particle undergoes boring ordinary diffusion. However, the signature of activity shows up at early or short times. At short times, the dynamics is highly anisotropic. We compute exactly the probability (...)
    • Agnese Seminara (CNRS, University of Nice)
      Lundi 10 décembre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Strategies for fungal spore dispersal
      Fungi range from decomposers to symbionts, parasites and pathogens and are among the worst threats and at the same time the most fundamental components of many ecosystems. The fungi may lack legs or wings for locomotion, but they routinely translocate even across oceans by dispersing their spores, causing the (...)
    • Mark Warner (Cambridge University)
      Lundi 3 décembre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Inducing curved metrics in materials gives new mechanics
      Radically novel materials, liquid crystalline elastomers and glasses, change shape by 100 per cent following changes in temperature or illumination. Shape change, that is elongation along a particular direction, rather than simply change of volume, can be imaginatively arranged induce intrinsic curvature in (...)
    • Julien Tailleur (MSC, University Paris Diderot)
      Lundi 26 novembre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Motility regulation as a self-organisation principle
      Beyond a simple expression for a steady-state distribution, equilibrium statistical mechanics teach us principles on how to control the self-assembly of passive materials by tuning the competition between energy and entropy to achieve desired states of organization. Out of equilibrium, no such principles apply and (...)
    • Hamid Kellay (LOMA, Bordeaux)
      Lundi 19 novembre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Hydrodynamics experiments using soap films and soap bubbles
      I will describe experiments using soap films and soap bubbles to illustrate the interest of these common objects to some fluid mechanics problems. The flow in the very thin layer of these films is basically two dimensional and this property brings fundamental differences with fluid flows in three dimensions as (...)
    • Gulliver Seminar Christophe Eloy (IRPHE, Marseille)
      Lundi 12 novembre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      What is role of hydrodynamic interactions in a fish school ?
      Fish schools offer a fascinating example of collective behavior in which the group coordinates without any leader. But what is the role played by the fluid flow in this coordination ? To address this question, we have developed a model that simulates the hydrodynamic interactions between hundreds of fish in a (...)
    • Séminaire Gulliver : Daniela Kraft (Leiden University)
      Lundi 5 novembre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      From colloidal joints to flexible colloidal molecules
      Colloidal molecules are designed to mimic their molecular analogues through their anisotropic shape and interactions. However, current experimental realizations are missing the structural flexibility present in real molecules thereby restricting their use as model systems. I will here show how this limitation can (...)
    • Thomas Risler (Institut Curie, Paris)
      Lundi 15 octobre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Instabilities and Fluctuations in Cellular Tissues
      Self-renewed cellular tissues can present different degrees of surface structures, which may originate from the stochastic nature of cell-renewal and force-generation processes as well as from inhomogeneities in the pattern of cell renewal. We first characterise the surface fluctuations of a thick cellular tissue (...)
    • Seminar Gulliver, Paddy Royall (University of Bristol)
      Lundi 8 octobre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04

      Revealing the Nature of Solidification : Fivefold Symmetry at the Nanoscale

      That fivefold symmetry should play a crucial role in the non-equilibrium behaviour of condensed matter was proposed by Sir Charles Frank in the 1950s.(...)
      Revealing the Nature of Solidification : Fivefold Symmetry at the Nanoscale
      That fivefold symmetry should play a crucial role in the non-equilibrium behaviour of condensed matter was proposed by Sir Charles Frank in the 1950s. Six decades later, the basic mechanism of the solidification of liquids remains unexplained, either in the case that the material crystallises, or that it forms an (...)

    • Séminaire Gulliver : Brian Tighe (TU Delft)
      Lundi 1er octobre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04

      Shearing, shrinking, and stiffening in elastic networks

      How do elastic networks stretch, shear, shrink, and expand ? Numerous materials ranging from biopolymers to solid foams to engineering frameworks have a network archite(...)
      Shearing, shrinking, and stiffening in elastic networks
      How do elastic networks stretch, shear, shrink, and expand ? Numerous materials ranging from biopolymers to solid foams to engineering frameworks have a network architecture : they consist of nodes connected by long-lived bonds that mediate local interactions. Even particulate systems such as emulsions and aqueous (...)

    • Séminaire Gulliver : Jean Farago (Institut Charles Sadron, Strasbourg)
      Lundi 24 septembre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04

      Voronoi observables, a tool to study dense assemblies of particles.

      Following the pioneering work of Rahman (JCP 1966), Voronoi tessellations are nowadays increasingly used to analyse microscopic fluids or granular structur(...)
      Voronoi observables, a tool to study dense assemblies of particles.
      Following the pioneering work of Rahman (JCP 1966), Voronoi tessellations are nowadays increasingly used to analyse microscopic fluids or granular structures, as they characterize unambiguously the geometry of the particles neighborhood. In this talk, I will present the general properties of Voronoi tessellations, (...)

    • Séminaire GULLIVER : M. Deforet (Sorbonne University)
      Lundi 17 septembre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Evolution in bacterial expanding populations
      In this work, I focus on the evolution of expanding populations, such as bacterial colonies or cancerous tumors. If population expansion is driven by growth and dispersal, then the evolutionary fate of a mutant should also depend on both growth and dispersal. Since these two traits are often constrained by a (...)
    • Séminaire GULLIVER : E. Aurell (KTH-Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
      Lundi 10 septembre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Genome-scale DCA
      Direct Coupling Analysis (DCA) has become a powerful tool to find pair-wise dependencies in data. It amounts to inferring coefficients in an Ising or a Potts model and then using the largest such inferred coefficients as predictors for the dependencies of interest. A main success has been to predict (...)
    • Séminaire GULLIVER : W. Huck (Radboud University)
      Lundi 3 septembre 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dissipative systems showing signs of life
      Complex networks of chemical reactions together define how life works. We are familiar with the metabolic networks studied in biochemistry, and in recent decades many regularly recurring network motifs have been uncovered that are responsible for much of the functional behaviour in signalling or genetic networks. (...)
    • Vincent Hakim (ENS, Laboratoire de Physique Statistique)
      Lundi 2 juillet 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Life and death in a floating world : the memorable case of synaptic domains
      Synapses mediate transmission of information between neurons and are generally thought to be the support of memory. When investigated at the molecular scale, synapses appear as dynamic assemblies, with constituents exchanged on timescales shorter than a few tens of minutes. This raises fundamental questions about (...)
    • Benjamin Davidovitch (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
      Lundi 25 juin 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Geometrically incompatible confinement and elastocapillary phenomena
      Confining thin objects, such as rods, sheets and shells, into a volume smaller than their lateral size typically generates in them stress. Relaxation of this stress often gives rise to the complex deformations –wrinkles, crumples, and folds– which are characterized by a multitude of spatial scale, indicating on a (...)
    • Matthieu Labousse (Gulliver)
      Lundi 18 juin 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Programming and reprogramming metamaterials
      The development of mechanical metamaterials rapidly grows and explores multiple strategies to design functional materials. Essentially a function relies on a internal structural property, so that a radical change of function often requires redesigning a new structure from scratch. Pre-encoding several functions in (...)
    • Jean-Louis Thomas (Institut des Nanosciences de Paris, UPMC)
      Lundi 11 juin 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Single beam acoustic tweezers
      Today, remote handling of tiny objects is efficiently performed by optical tweezers. They are quite efficient to handle particles ranging in size from a few micrometers to hundreds of nanometers and apply forces in the range of tens of picoNewton. However, for larger forces or larger objects, heating or (...)
    • Romain Mari (LiPhy, Grenoble)
      Lundi 4 juin 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dynamic vorticity banding in discontinuously shear thickening suspensions
      The phenomenon of discontinuous shear thickening is a step increase of the viscosity with increasing shear rate observed in some dense suspensions of hard particles, the most well-known example of being cornstarch suspensions. It is associated to an underlying shear stress versus shear rate constitutive curve (...)
    • Grzegorz Szamel (Colorado State University, USA)
      Lundi 28 mai 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Statistical Mechanics of Self-Propelled Particles
      Active matter systems consist of particles that are capable of self-propulsion. I will introduce one active matter model, the active Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model, and present two recent studies that challenge physical intuition. First, I will show that increasing departure from equilibrium due to persistent (...)
    • Thomas Hermans (ISIS, Université de Strasbourg)
      Lundi 23 avril 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
    • Daniela Kraft (Leiden University, the Netherlands)
      Lundi 9 avril 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Reconfigurable colloidal structures
      Reconfigurability is an essential feature of functional micro- and nanomachines. One way to realize reconfigurability is to introduce microscopic hinges, that is, elements that allow rotation while conserving the relative order of their arrangement. We have developed two experimental realizations of these pivotal (...)
    • Charles Baroud (Ladhyx and Département de mécanique, École Polytechnique)
      Lundi 26 mars 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Two stories on Ostwald ripnening in microfluidic devices
      I will first discuss the mechanical resistance of an armoured bubble, as a microscopic model of a pickering emulsion. In particular I will show measurements that contradict the classical elastic models of particle shells. Instead we find surprising scalings that have important implications on the stability of (...)
    • Patrick Tabeling (Gulliver)
      Lundi 19 mars 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Universal diagram for the kinetics of particle deposition in microchannels
      Why do particles, suspended in a fluid and travelling in a channel, deposit onto walls ? The question has far-reaching implications in different domains (filtering, syringeability, fouling…). Close to a channel wall, particles are subjected to a variety of effects, which control their trajectories : hydrodynamic (...)
    • Tom de Greef (Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands)
      Lundi 12 mars 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Engineering Bioinspired Molecular Networks and Synthetic Cells
      Complex signalling networks enable living cells to process information from their environment using an intricate network of regulatory interactions. These biochemical circuits function by converting an input signal (stimulus) through spatiotemporal interplay of signalling molecules (transduction) to an output (...)
    • Pierre Sens (Institut Curie)
      Lundi 5 mars 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Modelling the structure and dynamics of cellular organelles with non-equilibrium dynamics
      Membrane-bound organelles perform many essential functions in the cell, among which the sorting and biochemical maturation of cellular components. Organelles along the secretory and endocytic pathways are strongly out-of-equilibrium structures, which display large stochastic fluctuations of composition and shape (...)
    • Olivier Rivoire (Collège de France)
      Lundi 12 février 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Proteins in the light of evolution
      Proteins illustrate at a molecular scale our difficulty to apprehend biological systems. They highlight, in particular, the limitations of classical biophysics approaches. Many proteins are indeed extremely well characterized, from their constituents to the principles that govern their interactions. Yet, we (...)
    • Joshua McGraw (Gulliver)
      Lundi 5 février 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Capillary driven thin film dynamics — case studies of dewetting and capillary levelling for multilayer coextrusion and polymeric slip
      In the study of capillary-driven fluid dynamics, relatively simple departures from equilibrium offer the chance to quantitatively model the resulting relaxations. These dynamics in turn provide insight on both practical and fundamental aspects of thin-film and near-surface hydrodynamics. In this talk, we will (...)
    • Jordi Ignés-Mullol (University of Barcelona)
      Lundi 29 janvier 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Control of Active Materials by means of Addressable Soft Interfaces
      Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the self-assembly of subcellular autonomous units. Taming this biological activity (...)
    • Matthieu Roché (Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes, Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot)
      Lundi 22 janvier 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Marangoni effect induced by soluble surfactants
      The presence of a thermal gradient or surface concentration gradient in surfactant molecules along an interface between two liquids leads to the existence of an interfacial tension gradient and the establishment of a flow in the volume of each liquid. This mechanism is known as the (thermal and/or solutal) (...)
    • Benoit Scheid (TIPs laboratory, Université Libre de Bruxelles)
      Lundi 15 janvier 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dynamics and dissolution of bubbles in microchannels : role of transverse migration forces and Marangoni stresses
      This work focuses on the dynamics of a train of unconfined bubbles flowing in microchannels. We investigate the transverse position of a train of bubbles, its velocity and the associated pressure drop when flowing in a microchannel depending on the internal forces due to viscosity, inertia and capillarity. Despite (...)
    • André Estevez-Torres (Laboratoire Jean Perrin, CNRS et Sorbonne Université, Paris)
      Lundi 8 janvier 2018 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Synthesis of spatio-temporal structures with DNA molecular programs
      The question that motivates my research is to what extent non-equilibrium molecular systems can create order at the macroscopic scale, in particular spatial order. In an attempt to answer this question I will describe an approach that may be called "synthetic biology outside of cells". Firstly, I will introduce a (...)
  • 2017

    • Dominic Vella (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)
      Lundi 18 décembre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Thin elastic sheets at three-dimensional liquid interfaces
      The interaction of a thin elastic object, such as a polymeric sheet, with a liquid interface occurs in a range of problems : from the everyday case of wet dog hairs clumping to the stiction of components during the fabrication of Microelectromechanical System (MEMS). Much previous work has focussed on (...)
    • Wilhelm Huck (IMM, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands)
      Lundi 11 décembre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dissipative systems showing signs of life
      Complex networks of chemical reactions together define how life works. We are familiar with the metabolic networks studied in biochemistry, and in recent decades many regularly recurring network motifs have been uncovered that are responsible for much of the functional behaviour in signalling or genetic networks. (...)
    • Ralf Everaers (ENS Lyon)
      Lundi 4 décembre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Pincus relations for randomly branched polymers
      Randomly branched polymer chains (or trees) are a classical subject of polymer physics with connections to the theory of magnetic systems, percolation and critical phenomena. More recently, the model has been reconsidered for RNA, supercoiled DNA and the crumpling of topologically constrained polymers. While (...)
    • Brigitte Pansu (Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Université Paris-Sud)
      Lundi 27 novembre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Metallurgy of soft spheres : from BCC to Frank and Kasper phases…
      Understanding how soft particles can fill the space is still an open question. Structures far from classical FCC or BCC phases are now commonly experimentally observed in many different systems. Models based on pair interaction between soft particles are at present much studied in 2D. Pair interaction with two (...)
    • Sebastian Huber (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
      Lundi 20 novembre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A phononic quadrupole insulator
      Wave guiding in metamaterials can be achieved using a variety of design principles. We propose and implement the idea of employing topological surface states as a means to create stable and backscattering-free channels for mechanical vibrations. I will review our efforts in this direction, with a focus on a recent (...)
    • Laura Rossi (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
      Lundi 13 novembre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Colloidal design for self-assembly
      Inducing the controlled assembly of colloidal building blocks to prepare the next generation of functional materials with specific mechanical, optical or magnetic properties, requires exceptional control over the interactions between the building blocks. Shape can be a powerful tool to induce and control the (...)
    • Anton Zadorin (Gulliver, Chimie, Biologie, et Innovation, LBC)
      Lundi 6 novembre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Natural selection in compartmentalized environment with reshuffling
      The emerging field of compartmentalized in vitro evolution, where selection is carried out by differential reproduction in each compartment, is a promising new approach to protein engineering. From practical point of view, it is important to know the effect of the increase in the average number of genotype bearing (...)
    • Anne-Laure Biance (Institut Lumière Matière, Lyon)
      Lundi 16 octobre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Electroosmosis with surfactants : from one interface to a macroscopic foam
      Effects of surface-active materials on free surface flows have long been reported (since Franklin's observation of wave damping) and are encountered in many applications involving for example liquid foams or sprays. Nowadays, gas/liquid materials with a controlled micro or nanostructure are used to design new (...)
    • Salima Rafaï (LiPhy, Grenoble)
      Lundi 9 octobre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Flowing properties of a microswimmer suspension : Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a model active particle
      Suspensions of motile living organisms represent a non-equilibrium system of condensed matter of great interest from a fundamental point of view as well as for industrial applications. These are suspensions composed of autonomous units - active particles - capable of converting stored energy into motion. The (...)
    • Pierre Jop (Surface du Verre et Interfaces, CNRS/Saint-Gobain, Aubervilliers)
      Lundi 2 octobre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Encounter between a granular flow and a liquid : erosion and accretion
      Blending grains with a liquid is often the first step in an industrial process, but the triphasic nature of the medium yields general descriptions difficult : Cohesion induced by capillary bridges and the progression of liquid in the system create boundaries between zones of different mechanical behavior. Such (...)
    • Olivier Dauchot (Gulliver)
      Lundi 25 septembre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Model Experiments of Active Matter : at the interface between living organisms and theoretical models
      The ubiquity of collective motions observed at all scales in biological systems has driven a surge of scientific activity. Within physics, important theoretical progress was achieved by studying microscopic point-particles models and their continuous descriptions. Among the landmark results are the possibility of (...)
    • Lenka Zdeborova (CEA Saclay)
      Lundi 18 septembre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Statistical physics approach to compressed sensing and generalized linear regression
      Bayesian inference and statistical physics are formally closely related. Therefore methodology and concepts developed in statistical physics to understand disordered materials such as glasses and spin glasses can be elevated to analyze models of in statistical inference. We will present this approach in a rather (...)
    • Gaëtan Bellot (Institut de Génomique Fonctionnelle, INSERM, Montpellier)
      Lundi 11 septembre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      3D self-assembly using DNA as programmable molecules
      Our goal is to build artificial molecular systems and machines sufficiently sophisticated to recapitulate and decipher fundamental aspects of biology and to help solve problems of medical interest. We use a DNA self-assembly method called DNA origami, which represents a landmark as the first practical method to (...)
    • Lydia Robert (Laboratoire Jean Perrin, UPMC)
      Lundi 4 septembre 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dynamics of mutation accumulation and mutation fitness effects studied at the single cell level
      Mutations are the source of genetic variation upon which natural selection acts and therefore the driving force of evolution. In order to understand the generation of diversity among life forms, from the variety of Galapagos finches to the spread of antibiotic resistant bacterial strains, as well as the diversity (...)
    • Nicolas Bredeche (Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique, UPMC)
      Lundi 3 juillet 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Evolutionary robotics : a tool to understand and design collective behaviours in collective adaptive systems
      Collective adaptive systems are ubiquitous : from the many examples that can be observed in nature to artificial systems such as collective robotics or self-adaptive distributed algorithms. In this talk, I will describe two of our recent works on adaptive mechanisms in collective systems. Firstly, I will provide (...)
    • Sven van Teeffelen (Institut Pasteur, Paris)
      Lundi 19 juin 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Regulation of cell shape in bacteria
      Rod-like bacteria such as Escherichia coli control their macroscopic cylindrical shape with high precision by expanding and remodeling their cell envelope, in particular the peptidoglycan cell wall, a mesh of covalently bond sugar strands and peptide bonds. Many of the major components required for cell-wall (...)
    • François Ladieu (IRAMIS, CEA, Saclay)
      Lundi 12 juin 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Fifth-order susceptibility unveils the growth of thermodynamic amorphous order in glass-formers
      Glasses are ubiquitous in daily life and technology. However the microscopic mechanisms generating this state of matter are still controversially debated : glasses are considered either as merely hyper-viscous liquids or as resulting from a genuine thermodynamic phase transition towards a rigid state. We show that (...)
    • Rémi Carminati (Institut Langevin, ESPCI Paris)
      Lundi 29 mai 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A few surprises in multiple scattering of light from disordered materials
      Basic studies of light scattering and transport in disordered media are driven by fundamental issues in mesoscopic physics, and by applications in sensing and imaging. We will present recent results that predict unexpected behaviors of interest for the control of light matter-interaction in complex materials. We (...)
    • Anand Jagota (Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, USA)
      Lundi 22 mai 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Droplets on Compliant Substrates : Spontaneous Droplet Motion and Interaction
      Several novel phenomena have emerged from recent research in the behavior of drops on compliant substrates. Here we present (a) spontaneous droplet motion on a substrate with periodic variation of compliance, and (b) interaction of droplets separated by a thin elastic film. Droplet motion arises in many natural (...)
    • Ivan Smalyukh (University of Colorado, Boulder, USA)
      Lundi 15 mai 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Molecular-Colloidal Liquid Crystals
      A promising approach of designing mesostructured materials with novel physical behavior is based on combining unique optical and electronic properties of solid nanoparticles with long-range ordering and facile switching of soft matter. This lecture will describe how we experimentally realize molecular-colloidal (...)
    • Pascal Damman (Université de Mons, Belgique)
      Lundi 24 avril 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Preys capture by chameleons through viscous adhesion
      Several predators use an adhesive tongue to catch preys. Among theseones, chameleons are able to capture large preys by projecting the tongue at high acceleration. Once in contact with a prey, the tongue retracts with a comparable acceleration to bring it to the mouth. A strong adhesion between the tongue tip and (...)
    • Guillaume Grégoire (Institut de Calcul Intensif, ECN and MSC, Université Paris Diderot)
      Lundi 10 avril 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Flowing suspension of fibres in an effective solvent
      Composite materials are made of fibres which are embed in a matrix. Their micro-structures, their organisations lead to peculiar mechanical properties. But the manufacturing processes are made of multiphysics steps during which the material is heated up and sheared, for instance. It is well known that such (...)
    • Jacqueline Bloch (Laboratoire Photonique et Nanostructures, Marcoussis)
      Lundi 3 avril 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Quantum fluids of light in semiconductor microcavities
      Semiconductor microcavities appear today as a new platform for the study of quantum fluids of light. They enable confining both light and electronic excitations (excitons) in very small volumes. The resulting strong light-matter coupling gives rise to hybrid light-matter quasi-particles named cavity polaritons. (...)
    • Randall Kamien (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
      Lundi 27 mars 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Scissors Beats Paper
      I will describe work on the puzzles of periodic order (like crystals) on intrinsically curved surfaces (bumps). I will then demonstrate a partial method to avoid pitfalls by using the method of kirigami, `cut paper', to build curved materials that maintain a certain crystalline (...)
    • David Lacoste (Gulliver, ESPCI)
      Lundi 20 mars 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Information theoretic analysis of stochasticity in metabolism
      Fluctuations in gene expression and growth rate of single cells can have important consequences for cellular function and fitness. In ref [1], fluctuations in the instantaneous growth rate of single cells of Escherichia coli and in the expression of metabolic enzymes have been measured using time-lapse microscopy. (...)
    • James Forrest (University of Waterloo, Canada, Chaire Joliot)
      Lundi 13 mars 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Some polymer physics at small N
      The polymerisation index, N, is one of the most important parameter in determining polymer behavior. A large majority of work in polymer science focuses on large N, where the polymer molecules behave almost like random chains. I will present some of our recent experimental findings using near oligomeric (...)
    • Florian Hollfelder (University of Cambridge, UK)
      Lundi 27 février 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Rules and Tools for Efficient Enzyme Evolution, Recruitment and Discovery Based on Catalytic Promiscuity
      ‘Promiscuous' enzymes possess additional activities in addition to their native ones, challenging the textbook adage “one enzyme – one activity”. The observation of strong promiscuous activities in the alkaline phosphatase (AP) superfamily - where one active site can catalyse up to six chemically distinct hydrolytic (...)
    • Frédéric van Wijland (Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes, Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot)
      Lundi 20 février 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      How far from equilibrium is active matter ?
      Active Matter in 2016 encompasses such a broad range of systems that it is almost a challenge to define what's behind this terminology. One of the unifying characteristics to all active systems is that individual constituents convert an external continuous supply of energy into random motion. On a representative (...)
    • Alberto Rosso (LPTMS Orsay)
      Lundi 13 février 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Spatio-temporal patterns in ultra-slow domain wall creep dynamics
      Manipulation and storage of information in magnetic, ferroic and spintronic materials heavily rests on the possibility to create domains and, especially, to govern their boundaries. The control of domain wall dynamics is of crucial importance and hinges on our ability to describe its basic nature ; so much that (...)
    • Guy-Bart Stan (Imperial College London, UK)
      Lundi 6 février 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Shared resources and biomolecular feedback considerations for engineering of bacterial cells with improved robustness and performance
      In this talk I will give an overview of some of our research activities in the "Control Engineering Synthetic Biology" group, where we focus our efforts on developing foundational forward-engineering methods to mathematically model, control, and experimentally implement synthetic gene circuits and cellular systems (...)
    • Emmanuelle Gouillart (Surface du Verre et Interfaces, CNRS/Saint-Gobain, Aubervilliers)
      Lundi 30 janvier 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Microstructure coarsening in phase-separated viscous liquids observed by in situ synchrotron microtomography
      Phase separation concerns a wide range of liquids, from polymers to glass melts. In the coarsening regime, the typical size of phase separated domains grows with time in order to reduce interfacial energy. The kinetics of coarsening [Bray2002] are determined by physical properties of the liquids, but also by the (...)
    • Jean-Louis Barrat (LiPhy, Grenoble)
      Lundi 23 janvier 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Statistics of stress avalanches in deformed amorphous solids : insight from elastoplastic models
      Elastoplastic models [1] describe the deformation of amorphous solids through a simple lattice based implementation of the scenario identified in numerous experiments and simulations [2] : irreversible ”shear transformations”, take place in localized regions in the stressed material, and the corresponding stress (...)
    • Luca Cipelletti (Laboratoire Charles Coulomb, Montpellier)
      Lundi 16 janvier 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The glass transition of soft colloids
      We use a combination of light and X-ray scattering, rheology, and numerical simulations to provide a comprehensive picture of the glassy dynamics in soft colloids. We observe a rapid growth of the structural relaxation time with volume fraction at equilibrium, which is nearly independent of particle softness, in (...)
    • Hervé Isambert (Institut Curie)
      Lundi 9 janvier 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Learning causal networks with latent variables from multivariate information in genomic data
      Learning causal networks from large-scale genomic data remains challenging in absence of time series or controlled perturbation experiments. We have developed and implemented an information-theoretic method which learns a large class of graphical models from purely observational data. The approach unifies causal (...)
    • Anne-Florence Bitbol (Laboratoire Jean Perrin, UPMC)
      Lundi 2 janvier 2017 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Inferring interaction partners from protein sequences
      Specific protein-protein interactions play crucial roles in the stability of multi-protein complexes and in signal transduction. Thus, mapping these interactions is key to a systems-level understanding of cells. However, systematic experimental identification of protein interaction partners is still challenging, (...)
  • 2016

    • Emmanuel Fort (Institut Langevin, ESPCI)
      Lundi 12 décembre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Time mirrors and temporal cavities
      Wave control is usually performed by engineering the spatial properties of the medium. Because space and time play similar roles, it is possible to perform time manipulations with a dual approach. In this talk, I will show how such manipulations enable one to obtain a “time reversal machine” for the waves. In (...)
    • Catherine Quilliet (LiPhy Grenoble)
      Lundi 5 décembre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Shell deformation and swimming
      A spherical hollow object, isotropic and homogeneous at the scale of its radius (micronic in various examples to be found in Soft Matter, biology, or in miniaturized devices) is likely to present a diversity of shapes when its volume is decreased. Such an object being fruitfully modelled by a closed elastic (...)
    • Kirsten Martens (LiPhy Grenoble)
      Lundi 28 novembre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Mesoscopic modeling - specific ingredients and emergent behaviours
      In this talk I will discuss several mesoscopic approaches, such as lattice models and mean-field descriptions for the yielding transition and the non-linear rheology of driven yield-stress materials. Despite the fact that this type of models require some phenomenological ingredients, notably the detailed local (...)
    • Denis Bartolo (ENS Lyon)
      Lundi 21 novembre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Flocking through disorder
      How do flocks, herds and swarms proceed through disordered environments ? This question is not only crucial to the displacement of animal groups in the wild, but also to virtually all applications of collective robotics, and active materials composed of motile units. In stark contrast, appart from very rare (...)
    • Élisabeth Lemaire (LPMC, Nice)
      Lundi 14 novembre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Rheology of non-Brownian concentrated suspensions : the role of contact forces between particles
      Creeping flows of non-Brownian suspensions are ubiquitous in industrial processes (charged polymers, fresh concrete, solid rocket propellants…) as well as in natural phenomena (sedimentary flows, landslides…). Even when the suspending fluid is Newtonian, these concentrated suspensions exhibit a complex rheology. For (...)
    • David Dean (LOMA Bordeaux)
      Lundi 7 novembre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Stochastic Density Functional Theory for Electrolytes Out of Equilibrium
      The dynamics of interacting Brownian particles can be described by a stochastic equation for the density field. I will show how the linearised version of this equation can be used to recover, very simply, certain of Onsager's results on electrolyte conductivity. In addition I will show how it can analyse the out (...)
    • Aleksandra Walczak (LPT ENS)
      Lundi 24 octobre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Diversity of immune repertoires
      Recognition of pathogens relies on the diversity of immune receptor proteins. Recent experiments that sequence the entire immune cell repertoires provide a new opportunity for quantitative insight into naturally occurring diversity and how it is generated. I will show how by applying statistical inference to these (...)
    • Chaouqi Misbah (LiPhy, Grenoble)
      Lundi 17 octobre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Blood : flow, swimming and patterns
      Blood elements (like red blood cells=RBC) can either be transported by a flow or they can behave as active machines –amoeboid swimmers– (the case of leukocytes). In the first part, several rich dynamics and patterns of RBCs under flow will be described, such as "blood crystals" (spontaneous order of RBCs under pure (...)
    • Werner Krauth (LPS, ENS)
      Lundi 10 octobre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Two-dimensional melting : New algorithms, new insights
      The hard-disk model has exerted outstanding influence on computational physics and statistical mechanics. Decades ago, hard disks were the first system to be studied by Markov-chain Monte Carlo methods (1) and by molecular dynamics (2). It was in hard disks, through numerical simulations, that a two-dimensional (...)
    • Alexander Leshansky (Technion, Israel)
      Lundi 3 octobre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dynamics of externally actuated magnetic propellers
      Technology based on magnetic micro-/nanopropellers that can be actuated remotely by a low strength rotating magnetic field and steered at high precision through various fluidics environments is considered attractive towards potential biomedical applications. Despite the substantial progress in microfabrication, (...)
    • Jean-Baptiste Fournier (Université Paris Diderot, Laboratoire MSC)
      Lundi 26 septembre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Hydrodynamics of bio-membranes
      After recalling the Stokes flow equations of ordinary viscous fluids, I will describe the original approach of Brochard and Lennon for the hydrodynamics of bio-membranes and red blood cells. Then I will discuss the more complete and rigorous theory of Seifert and Langer together with two applications : the (...)
    • Gladys Massiera (L2C Montpellier)
      Lundi 19 septembre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Continuous Droplet Interface Crossing Encapsulation (cDICE) : from vesicles to capsules
      The Continuous Droplet Interface Crossing Encapsulation (cDICE) is an easy and robust method for producing, at high yield, monodisperse lipid vesicles with a controlled content as well as capsules with a designed shell. It consists in forcing a droplet through an interface between two imiscible fluids, using an (...)
    • Sylvie Hénon (MSC Université Diderot)
      Lundi 12 septembre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Passive and active mechanical properties of muscle cells. Role of desmin intermediate filament.
      The mechanical interactions of living systems with their environment play a central role both in healthy and pathological contexts. For instance, organs can feel and respond to the mechanical properties of their surroundings. This is particularly obvious for muscles. I will present our measurements of the (...)
    • Cécile Appert-Rolland (LPT Orsay)
      Lundi 5 septembre 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Intracellular bidirectional transport of cargos by teams of motors
      Within cells, various objects (vesicles, organelles,...) need to be transported. Some processive molecular motors get attached to these objects (or cargos) to form a complex that will have a stochastic motion along a network of microtubules. Intriguingly, there is some evidence that this motion results from a (...)
    • Anne Juel (University of Manchester, UK)
      Lundi 11 juillet 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Fingering Instabilities in Compliant Channels
      What links a baby's first breath to adhesive debonding, enhanced oil recovery, or even drop-on-demand devices ? All these processes involve moving or expanding bubbles displacing fluid in a confined space, bounded by either rigid or elastic walls. In this talk, we show how spatial confinement may either induce or (...)
    • Daniel Bonn (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
      Lundi 4 juillet 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Granular Friction : from Building the Pyramids to the Anatomy of Individual Contacts at the Nanoscale
      I will discuss the rheology and mechanical properties of wet granular materials, and show why the behavior can be very subtle. Once one understands the mechanical properties, I will show that one can use this knowledge to construct the perfect sandcastle, or to understand why the ancient Egyptians wetted the (...)
    • Matthieu Wyart (EPFL, Switzerland)
      Lundi 27 juin 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Levy Flight in Mayonnaise
      Glassy systems with long-range interactions often present avalanche type-response under slow driving, as well as a vanishing density of excitation at low energy or “pseudo gap”. I will explain why these facts must come together, and discuss in particular the plasticity of amorphous solids (for example, how does a (...)
    • Kristina Davitt (LPS, ENS)
      Lundi 20 juin 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Contact Angle Hysteresis and Dynamics on Real Surfaces
      Real surfaces are rough, chemically heterogeneous, coated with molecular layers, or even all of the above. It is well known that liquid drops on such surfaces exhibit a contact angle hysteresis due to the pinning of the contact line. Over 30 years ago Joanny and de Gennes developed what is arguably still the best (...)
    • Alberto Fernandez-Nieves (Paris Sciences Chair & Georgia Tech, USA)
      Lundi 13 juin 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      From Active Nematics on Tori to Fire Ants in the Rheometer
      We will discuss recent results with different types of active materials. We will begin by looking at active nematics on toroidal surfaces. We will illustrate defect unbinding and defect-curvature coupling, consistent with theoretical expectations for inactive ordered materials arranged on the surface a torus. In (...)
    • Christophe Goupil (PIERI, Université Paris Diderot)
      Lundi 6 juin 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Thermoelectricity : From Classical to Quantum Engines
      Thermoelectric effects result from the interference of electrical current and heat flow in various materials. This interaction, characterized by a coupling parameter called thermopower, allows direct conversion of heat to electricity ; conversely cooling may be obtained by application of a voltage across a (...)
    • Eric Bertin (LIPhy, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble)
      Lundi 30 mai 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      On the Breaking of Energy Equipartition in Non-Equilibrium Systems
      Energy equipartition between degrees of freedom having a quadratic energy is a cornerstone of equilibrium statistical physics. In the presence of correlations, equipartition often applies to extended modes, like Fourier or normal modes, rather than to localized degrees of freedom. For systems driven out of (...)
    • David Ruelle (IHES, Bures-sur-Yvette)
      Lundi 23 mai 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Generalized Detailed Balance and Biological Applications
      A detailed balance relation is an identity based on time reversal symmetry of time evolution equations. This identity, which is part of statistical mechanics, relates the probability of an evolution J->K and the reverse evolution K->J. Ambitious applications of detailed balance to biological replication have been (...)
    • Cécile Cottin-Bizonne (ILM, Université Lyon I)
      Lundi 9 mai 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      From Dilute to Dense Suspensions of Active Colloids
      Diffusiophoresis is an interfacially driven transport phenomenon, leading to the motion of macro-molecules under solute gradients. It is an efficient but rather unexplored mean to drive and manipulate particles. This energy transduction mechanism can also be used to device self-propelled particles. In this talk I (...)
    • Giulio Biroli (IPhT, CEA Saclay)
      Lundi 2 mai 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Breakdown of Elasticity in Amorphous Solids
      What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations. For amorphous solids the situation is instead less clear, and the (...)
    • David Andelman (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
      Lundi 25 avril 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      One Hundred Years of Electrified Interfaces : Past, Present and Future
      The Poisson-Boltzmann theory is a mean-field description of ionic solutions and charge interfaces, and it has been instrumental during the last century to predict charge distributions and interactions between charged macromolecules. While the electrostatic model of charged fluids, on which the Poisson-Boltzmann (...)
    • Stéphane Santucci (ENS Lyon)
      Lundi 18 avril 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Intermittent Avalanche Dynamics of Slow Imbibition Fronts
      I will review our experimental study of the dynamics of a viscous wetting fluid interface forced to invade a disordered medium –a model open fracture– at constant flow rate. Distortions of the advancing imbibition front produced by capillary pressure fluctuations (due to the heterogeneities of the medium) are damped (...)
    • Joseph Paulsen (Joliot Chair & Syracuse University, USA)
      Lundi 11 avril 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Noise Stabilization of Multiple Memories in Sheared Non-Brownian Suspensions
      A system with multiple transient memories can remember a set of inputs, but will forget most of them, even as they are continually applied. If noise is added, the system can store all memories for much longer. This behavior is a remarkable and counterintuitive example of how information can be stored in disordered (...)
    • Peter Schall (Joliot Chair & University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
      Lundi 4 avril 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Nonequilibrium Transitions Govern the Flow of Glasses
      The understanding of glasses remains one of the grand challenges in condensed matter : glasses have liquid-like structure, but exhibit solid-like properties. These materials inspire us to re-think the notion of flow and rigidity of solids. Recent theory and experiments suggest novel nonequilibrium transitions to (...)
    • Friedrich Simmel (TU Munich, Germany)
      Lundi 21 mars 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Molecular Devices Based on Nucleic Acids
      Over the past years, DNA nanotechnology has developed tremendously, and it is now possible to create nanoscale molecular devices of considerable complexity. After a general introduction to the field, we will here demonstrate a variety of machine-like devices based on DNA such as DNA-based membrane channels, large (...)
    • Emilie Dressaire (NYU, USA)
      Lundi 14 mars 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Fluid Flow on and in Complex Media
      In this talk, I will present experiments devoted to systems in which the couplings between the fluid and the surrounding medium lead to interesting flow dynamics. We will first consider the thin liquid films formed when jets impinge on solid surfaces such as hydraulic jumps and water bells. On a smooth surface, (...)
    • Jon Otto Fossum (Joliot Chair & NTNU, Norway)
      Lundi 7 mars 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Clay Physics
      In this talk, we will first give a very condensed introduction to the kind of soft and complex matter physics one can encounter in clays, by giving some illustrating highlights from our own and other group's scientific activities in this area. Secondly we will briefly review some known present and some maybe not (...)
    • Yannick Rondelez (University of Tokyo, Japan)
      Lundi 29 février 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      In Vitro Models of Cellular Computing
      Living cells use webs of chemical reactions organized in precise networks to perform informational tasks. This concept is at the very core of systems biology, but also share links with electronic or computer science. The dynamical and information-processing properties of living cells, i.e. their ability to make (...)
    • Günter Reiter (Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg, Germany)
      Lundi 22 février 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Transient Cooperative Processes in Dewetting Polymer Melts
      We have compared the high velocity dewetting behavior, at elevated temperatures, of atactic (aPS) and isotactic polystyrene (iPS) films, with the zero shear bulk viscosity (ηbulk) of aPS being 10 times larger than that of iPS. As expected, for aPS the apparent viscosity of the films (ηf) derived from dewetting was (...)
    • Adrien Benusiglio (LPS, ENS)
      Lundi 15 février 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dancing Droplets (Marangoni Self-Contracted Self-Lubricated Volatile Droplets)
      When deposited on a clean glass slide, droplets of a mixture of propylene glycol and water of various concentrations enter a chaotic ballet for minutes, hence the name “dancing droplets”. Looking at one isolated droplet is already a surprise, as the mixture that should spread is instead stabilized by a gradient of (...)
    • Ludovic Berthier (Laboratoire Charles Coulomb, Université de Montpellier)
      Lundi 8 février 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Collective Motion in Dense Active Materials
      We discuss how the nonequilibrium driving forces introduced by the natural biological activity or by physical self-propulsion mechanisms generically affect the structure, dynamics and phase behavior of dense active media. We use theory and computer simulations to analyse simple models of such active materials. We (...)
    • Thierry Ondarçuhu (CEMES, Toulouse)
      Lundi 1er février 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      AFM Study of Liquid Nanomenisci and Wetting of Partially Supported Graphene Monolayers
      The recent development of nanofluidics raises many questions about hydrodynamics and wetting at nanometer scale. I will present two experiments developed in CEMES to address these issues. I will show that that advanced FM-AFM techniques are promising tools for the investigation of mechanical properties of (...)
    • François Lequeux (SIMM, ESPCI)
      Lundi 25 janvier 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Role of Dynamical Heterogeneities in the Mechanics of Glassy Polymer
      Dynamical heterogeneities in glass - and peculiarly for polymer glasses - have been since more than 20 years the object of many debates. Nowadays, the actual picture is fairly simple ; glass can be considered as tiled by nanometric domains with very different dynamics. More precisely, the dynamics of the monomer (...)
    • Elisabeth Charlaix (LiPhy, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble)
      Lundi 18 janvier 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Hydrodynamic Forces : from Boundary Slippage to the Mechanics of Soft Surfaces
      Surface forces measurements have been an invaluable tool to perform quantitative mechanical probing at a nano-scale, and have contributed to our understanding of the friction of liquids onto solid surfaces and dissipation in confined liquid layers. But beyond the scope of friction, the measurement of (...)
    • Eric Lauga (DAMTP, University of Cambridge)
      Lundi 11 janvier 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Hydrodynamic Interactions between Flagellar Filaments
      Many small organisms possess flagella, slender whiplike appendages which are actuated in a periodic fashion in fluids and allow the cells to self-propel. In particular, most motile bacteria are equipped with multiple helical rotating flagella which interact hydrodynamically, synchronize, and can form a tight (...)
    • Detlef Lohse (Saint-Gobain Chair & University of Twente, Netherlands)
      Lundi 4 janvier 2016 de 11h30 à 12h30 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Floating on Air
      A drop impacting on a solid surface deforms before the liquid makes contact with the surface. We directly measure the time evolution of the air layer profile under the droplet using high-speed color interferometry, obtaining the air layer thickness before and during the wetting process and the volume of the (...)
  • 2015

    • Jacco Snoeijer (University of Twente, Netherlands)
      Lundi 14 décembre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Surface Tension Regularises the Crack Singularity of Adhesive Contacts
      Recent studies revealed a profound connection between “liquid wetting” and “solid adhesion” : both emerge as a limiting case for adhesion between sticky, elastic bodies. Here we address the unification of wetting and adhesion on the level of the contact mechanics. We first show that soft elastic bodies can exhibit a (...)
    • Ramin Golestanian (University of Oxford, UK)
      Lundi 7 décembre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Collective Chemotaxis of Colloidal and Living Active Matter
      The non-equilibrium dynamics of active particles that send and receive chemical signals could lead to spontaneous formation of interesting structures and patterns due to the long-range nature of the interactions. I examine theoretically the consequences of this interaction, and present some results that exemplify (...)
    • Andreas Carlson (University of Oslo, Norway)
      Mardi 1er décembre 2015 de 11h00 à 12h00 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Elastohydrodynamic Singularity and Self-similarity in Contacting Sheets
      The dynamics of contact between a thin elastic film and a solid arises in many scientific and engineering applications, from the simple saran-wrap to cellular adhesion to grounding lines in ice sheets. Elastohydrodynamic lubrication theory allows us to derive a partial differential equation coupling the elastic (...)
    • Frédéric Léchenault (LPS, ENS)
      Lundi 30 novembre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Origami Mechanics
      Over the past thirty years, the ancient art of paper folding, or origami, has evolved into an interdisciplinary scientific field. Origami offers the possibility for new metamaterials whose overall mechanical properties can be programmed by acting locally on each crease. Origami metamaterials show for example (...)
    • Ullrich Steiner (Adolphe Merkle Institute, University of Friburg, Switzerland)
      Lundi 23 novembre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Structure-Function Relationship in Polymer Solar Cells
      Organic solar cells typically consist of several components and it is long recognised that their efficiency depends on the detailed morphology of these constituents. Structure formation in two components systems, often containing a conjugated polymer and a C60 derivative, is currently not well understood and the (...)
    • Jérôme Casas (Paris Sciences Chair & Université de Tours)
      Lundi 16 novembre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Flow Microsensors : From Insects to MEMS and Back
      Jérôme Casas, Paris Sciences Chair & Université de Tours I will start this talk by making a short excursion into the physical ecology of insects which we study with colleagues of the ESPCI and other physicists of similar spirit. I will then deal with the latest advances in our understanding of insect and man-made (...)
    • François Boulogne (Princeton University, USA)
      Lundi 9 novembre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Homogeneous Deposition of Particles on Hydrogels by Absorption
      A drying drop containing solid particles like tea or coffee leaves a ring stain resulting from the accumulation of the particles near the contact line. In most of industrial applications such as printing, coating or biological microtechnologies, these inhomogeneities must be avoided. A significant range of new (...)
    • Pascal Martin (Institut Curie)
      Lundi 2 novembre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Friction from Ion Channels' Gating on Vibrating Hair-Cell Bundles from the Inner Ear
      Hearing starts when sound-evoked mechanical vibrations of the hair-cell bundle activate mechanosensitive ion channels, giving birth to an electrical signal As for any mechanical system, friction impedes movements of the hair bundle and thus constrains the sensitivity and frequency selectivity of auditory (...)
    • Adrian Daerr (MSC, Université Paris Diderot)
      Lundi 26 octobre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Wetting Dynamics and Mass Swarming of Bacillus Subtilis over Soft Gel Substrates
      Bacillus subtilis forms dendric colonies on gel surfaces through the collective motion of groups of 10^4 to 10^5 cells which form the compact tips of elongating dendrites. We investigate some physical aspects of this phenomenon, for which humidity and the surfactant production by the bacteria play as much of a (...)
    • Jörg Baschnagel (ICS, Université de Strasbourg)
      Lundi 19 octobre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      MD Simulation of Supercooled Polymer Melts : Modeling of Single-Monomer Dynamics by a Continuous-Time Random Walk Approach
      We present results of molecular-dynamics (MD) simulations for the dynamics of supercooled polymer melts. After an introduction to the simulation model and its ensemble-averaged properties, we analyze the dynamics of single-monomer trajectories. In the supercooled state near the critical temperature of (...)
    • Annie Colin (SIMM, ESPCI)
      Lundi 12 octobre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Flow of Non-Brownian Suspension in Pipe
      Suspensions are ubiquitous in nature and are encountered in many applications : cement and concrete technology, ceramic processing, coating and pigment technology, propellants and explosives, mineral processing, soil science, composite processing and various slurry flow technologies. The rheological properties of (...)
    • Lionel Bureau (LIPhy, Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble)
      Lundi 5 octobre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The Physics of Stimuli-Responsive Polymer Brushes Probed with Optics
      Advanced functional substrates designed from polymer brushes have known a rapidly growing interest over the past fiteen years, with a particular attention paid to the elaboration of brushes made of stimuli-responsive polymers, in order to design smart surfaces whose properties can be altered on demand via the (...)
    • Hanneke Gelderblom (University of Twente, Netherlands)
      Lundi 28 septembre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Propelling and Shaping Liquid Drops by Laser-Pulse Impact
      The impact of a laser pulse onto a liquid drop can be so violent that it leads to strong propulsion, deformation and eventually fragmentation of the drop. Here, we investigate how the drop response depends on the laser-pulse properties and drop characteristics by combining high-speed and stroboscopic imaging (...)
    • Karsten Kruse (Universität des Saarlandes, Germany)
      Lundi 21 septembre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Spontaneous Actin Polymerization Waves and Cell Motility
      The crawling of living cells on solid substrates is often driven by the actin cytoskeleton, a network of structurally polar filamentous proteins that is intrinsically driven by the hydrolysis of ATP. How cells organize their actin network during crawling is still poorly understood. A possible general mechanism (...)
    • Etienne Rolley (LPS, ENS)
      Lundi 14 septembre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Adsorption-Induced Strains of a Nanoscale Silicon Honeycomb
      Porous Silicon obtained from highly doped Si can be thought of as a nanoscale random honeycomb with pores parallel to the [001] axis. For about 10 years, this system has received renewed attention as a model system for adsorption studies. One of the intriguing features of this system is that the emptying of (...)
    • Frédéric Restagno (LPS, Université Paris-Sud)
      Lundi 7 septembre 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Polymer Brushes Dynamics in Melt, Sheared and Confined Situations
      End tethered polymer chains have been recognized to be excellent adhesion promoters at polymer interfaces provided that they can penetrate and interdigitate into the bulk polymer. As a consequence, tethered chain dynamics is of major importance to understand the mechanical answer of a polymer close to a surface. (...)
    • Soft Matter Days 2015
      From 2 July at 09:00 to 3 July 2015 at 17:50
    • Jean-François Lutz (Institut Charles Sadron, Strasbourg)
      Lundi 29 juin 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Unnatural Information-containing Macromolecules
      Information-containing macromolecules are polymers that contain a message encrypted in their comonomer sequences. The archetypal example of such a polymer is DNA, which is used in biology to store genetic information. However, DNA is certainly not the only polymer that can contain molecular information. In (...)
    • Tristan Baumberger (INSP, Paris VI)
      Lundi 22 juin 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Build-Up of a Thermoreversible Polymer Network : from Early Local to Late Collective Dynamics
      Thermoreversible polymer gels exhibit slow - logarithmic - mechanical strengthening. As is the case for many disordered systems, although this aging process is handwavingly ascribable to the “complexity of the energy landscape”, a more detailed understanding remains elusive. In order to gain some insight into the (...)
    • Martin Bazant (MIT, USA)
      Lundi 15 juin 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Control of Dendritic Growth in Electrodeposition
      For over 30 years, physicists have studied electrodeposition as a canonical example of fractal dendritic growth. The simplest model is Diffusion-Limited Aggregation (DLA), but electromigration, convection, and surface phenomena also play important roles. This talk will introduce the basic physics of (...)
    • Alberto Fernandez-Nieves (Paris Sciences Chair & Georgia Tech, USA)
      Lundi 8 juin 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Toroidal Droplets – Generation, Evolution in the Absence and in the Presence of Charge, Stabilization and Nematic Order
      We will describe our experiments on the generation, hydrodynamic stability and stabilization of toroidal droplets ; we will discuss both neutral and charged toroidal droplets. We will then focus on nematics and discuss how the toroidal confinement affects the director organization inside these spaces, both for (...)
    • Herbert Hui (Paris Sciences Chair & Cornell University, USA)
      Lundi 1er juin 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Surface Tension in Solids and its Effect on the Mechanics of Contact and Fracture
      Elasto-capillarity phenomena – solid deformation driven by liquid surface tension – have been extensively studied, but are distinct from phenomena driven by solid surface tension. The characteristic length scale that describes the deformation of a solid due to surface tension is given by the ratio between the (...)
    • Abdelhamid Maali (LOMA, Université de Bordeaux)
      Lundi 18 mai 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dynamic AFM : Nano-Rheology of Confined Fluids
      In this talk I will present a study of the atomic force microscope (AFM) in liquid medium and its application to the study of the rheology of confined fluids. We will see that the AFM allows not only to image the surface of a substrate but also to measure the properties of the medium that is confined between the (...)
    • James Forrest (Total Chair & University of Waterloo, Canada)
      Lundi 11 mai 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Towards an Understanding of Glass Transitions in Thin Films
      For the past 20 years, there has been significant experimental, computational, and theoretical work on anomalous dynamics in thin films of glass forming polymers. Even considering only the single material, polystyrene (PS), the number of experiments, and the wide range of conclusions that have been reached from (...)
    • Karin Jacobs (Universität des Saarlandes, Germany)
      Lundi 4 mai 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Adhesion, Adsorption and Friction : Are Surface Phenomena Superficial ?
      As adhesion is a key issue for researchers of various fields, it is of uppermost importance to understand the parameters that are involved. Commonly, only surface parameters are employed to determine the adhesive forces between materials. Yet, van der Waals forces act not only between atoms in the vicinity of the (...)
    • Karin Sadoul (Institut Albert Bonniot, Grenoble)
      Lundi 27 avril 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Motor-Driven Marginal Band Coiling Promotes Cell Shape Change During Platelet Activation
      Boubou Diagouraga, Alexei Grichine, Arnold Fertin, Jin Wang, Saadi Khochbin and Karin Sadoul Circulating quiescent platelets have a flat, discoid shape maintained by a peripheral ring of microtubules, called the marginal band. Platelets are activated after vessel injury and undergo a major shape change known as (...)
    • Martin Lenz (LPTMS, Université Paris-Sud)
      Lundi 20 avril 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Disordered Actomyosin Contracts in Unexpected Ways
      The motion of living cells is in large part due to the interaction of semi-flexible actin filaments (F-actin) and myosin molecular motors, which induce the relative sliding of F-actin. It is often assumed that this simple sliding is sufficient to account for all actomyosin-based motion. While this is correct in (...)
    • Andrew Griffiths (LBC, ESPCI)
      Lundi 13 avril 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Droplet-based Microfluidics for Ultra-High-Throughput Digital Biology
      Programmable microfluidic modules have been created which can precisely make, combine, split, mix, incubate, detect fluorescence and sort microscopic droplets. Integration of multiple modules onto a single microfluidics chip enables a vast number of assays (> 105 / min) to be performed using extremely low volumes (...)
    • Fabian Brau (ULB, Belgium)
      Lundi 30 mars 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Morphogenesis, Self-Organization and Fracture in Elastic Thin Sheets
      When a curtain is suspended, a periodic deformation, having a given mean wavelength, is usually applied at one of its edges. This deformation relaxes along the curtain producing a cascade of folds characterized by an increase of the mean wavelength. We will show that this pattern can be understood as a (...)
    • Massimiliano Esposito (Joliot Chair & University of Luxembourg)
      Lundi 23 mars 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics of Closed and Open Chemical Networks
      I will present a systematic procedure to study the thermodynamics of chemical networks made of coupled elementary reactions satisfying mass action law. Convergence to equilibrium is proved in closed networks. In open networks (i.e. networks where concentrations of some of the species called chemostats are hold (...)
    • Basile Audoly (Institut d'Alembert, Paris VI)
      Lundi 16 mars 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Inextensible Elastic Ribbons : Models and Stability
      We consider the deformation of elastic ribbons, i.e. solids whose thickness is much smaller than the width, and whose width is much smaller than the length. A ribbon can typically be obtained by cutting out a strip in a piece of paper. From a mechanical perspective, the ribbon lies halfway between a (...)
    • Germain Rousseaux (Institut P', Poitiers)
      Lundi 9 mars 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The Naval Battle of Actium and the Myth of the Ship-Holder
      "The small Echeneis is present, wonderful to say, a great hindrance to ships." (Ovid, Halieutica)
    • David Gonzalez-Rodriguez (LadHyX, Polytechnique)
      Lundi 2 mars 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Cellular Morphodynamics : Shivering of Cellular Aggregates and Elasto-Capillary Instability of Mitochondria
      In this talk I will present two problems in cell mechanics where insight is gained through physical modeling and analogies to inert systems. First I will discuss our work on cellular aggregates, a simple laboratory model of tissues and tumors. We have studied the behavior of cellular aggregates under stretching (...)
    • Jean-Christophe Baret (CRPP, Université de Bordeaux)
      Lundi 23 février 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Soft Interfaces in Microfluidics
      Droplet-based microfluidics offers new means to miniaturize and automatize biochemical assays. The technology opens up on many applications in biotechnology, for example for single cell screening or molecular diagnostics. As the technology relies on emulsion manipulation in microchannels, it is crucial to (...)
    • François Pétrélis (LPS, ENS)
      Lundi 16 février 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Large Scale Dynamics and 1/f Fluctuations in Turbulence
      In a turbulent flow, many length scales contain energy. It is known for a long time that how the energy depends on the length scale is independent of details of the flow forcing or dissipation. Less in known about the temporal evolution of the turbulent field, in particular for the largest scales. I present a (...)
    • Olivier Pouliquen (IUSTI, Marseille)
      Lundi 9 février 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      How Plants Feel Gravity : a Granular Flow Problem ?
      A plant accidentally put in a horizontal position rapidly bends and deforms to recover a vertical position. The ability of plants to feel gravity thus plays a key role in their development and adaptation to environmental changes (gravitropism). A crucial step in this gravisensing occurs in specific cells, the (...)
    • Christophe Poulard (LPS, Paris XI)
      Lundi 2 février 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Adhesion with a Cassie-Wenzel-like Transition for Textured Elastic Contacts
      When a smooth sphere of elastomer is pressed against a substrate micropatterned with a regular hexagonal array of pillars, a transition between a contact only established at the top of the pillars (Cassie-like state) and a mixed contact with a central zone of full contact (Wenzel-like state) surrounded by a top (...)
    • Anne-Dominique Cambou (EC2M, Gulliver, ESPCI)
      Lundi 26 janvier 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Geometry and Ordering in Crumpled Sheets
      Graphene membranes, cabbage leaves, and even the Himalayas are all examples of thin sheets : objects with a thickness much smaller than their length and width. Despite their differences in size and in material composition, similar patterns emerge when sheets are crumpled or forced into a small three-dimensional (...)
    • Mederic Argentina (INLN, Nice)
      Lundi 19 janvier 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Scaling Macroscopic Aquatic Locomotion
      Inertial aquatic swimmers that use undulatory gaits range in length L from a few millimetres to 30 metres, across a wide array of biological taxa. Using elementary hydrodynamic arguments, we uncover a unifying mechanistic principle characterizing their locomotion by deriving a scaling relation that links swimming (...)
    • Vincent Démery (PCT, Gulliver, ESPCI)
      Lundi 5 janvier 2015 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Droplets Like to Wear Thin Polygonal Dresses
      A flat sheet must deform to wrap a liquid drop. Thin sheets (∼ 100 nm) wrap using small-scale wrinkles and folds, unlike thick sheets, which only bend over large scales. These features cost little mechanical energy but give considerable freedom to deform without stretching. We demonstrate that the global wrapped (...)
  • 2014

    • Jean-Christophe Géminard (Laboratoire de Physique, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon)
      Lundi 8 décembre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Softening Induced Instability of a Stretched Cohesive Granular Layer
      First, we report on a cellular pattern which spontaneously forms at the surface of a thin layer of a cohesive granular material submitted to in-plane stretching. We then present a simple model in which the mechanism responsible for the instability is the ‘‘strain softening'' exhibited by humid granular materials (...)
    • Clément Vulin (MSC, Paris Diderot)
      Lundi 1er décembre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A quantitative approach to microbial population growth using tailored cylindrical yeast colonies
      Microbes can form complex structures composed of millions to billions of cells. These assemblies contrast with the classical view we have of the “unicellulars” microbes. In fact, given their environment, they likely form heterogeneous connected structures, and our understanding of these assemblies is still scarce. (...)
    • Sergio Ciliberto (ENS Lyon)
      Lundi 24 novembre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Information and thermodynamics : Experimental verification of Landauer's erasure principle
      Rolf Landauer argued that the erasure of information is a dissipative process . A minimal quantity of heat, proportional to the thermal energy, is necessarily produced when a classical bit of information is deleted. A direct consequence of this logically irreversible transformation is that the entropy of the (...)
    • Leticia Cugliandolo (Université Pierre et Marie Curie)
      Lundi 17 novembre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Fast and slow quenches across second order phase transitions : the morphology of structures and the density of topological defects
      When a dissipative macroscopic system is driven through a second order phase transition (a quench) it undergoes an ordering process, usually called phase ordering. Typically, during this process, spatial regions with the order of the (competing) equilibrium phases increase in size and topological defects (be them (...)
    • Martin Brinkmann (Max Planck Institute, Allemagne)
      Lundi 10 novembre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A multi particle collision algorithm for simulating immiscible multi-phase flows and wetting
      Interfacial displacement in porous media occurs in many natural processes and technological applications, ranging from filtering or fuel cells to secondary oil recovery and ground water management. Despite large advances in recent years the simulation of multi-phase flows in contact to heterogeneously wettable (...)
    • Thomas Gibaud (ENS Lyon)
      Lundi 3 novembre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Hierarchical self-assembly of colloidal membranes
      Nature excels at building complex functional materials. We however are far from understanding the structure and mechanism involved in those materials and even further from being able to replicate equivalent materials. Here, we use stiff colloidal rods as minimalist building blocks to mimic biological structures (...)
    • Mathieu Leocmach (ENS, Lyon)
      Lundi 20 octobre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Yoghurt under stress
      Biogels formed through the self-association of polysaccharide coils, collagen, actin filaments or attractive globular proteins play a major role in biochemistry and microbiology, biological networks and cell mechanics as well as in food science. Their mechanical properties are the physical basis of biomechanics (...)
    • Xavier Noblin (LPMC, Nice)
      Lundi 13 octobre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Cavitation propagation in natural and artificial (microfabricated) systems
      The nucleation and growth of vapor bubble in a stretched liquid medium is a common phenomenon along boat helices. Main studies on cavitation in water under tension concern then hydraulics, but also acoustic or quasi-static conditions. These later are observed naturally in the sap conducting network of trees (...)
    • Axel Buguin (Institut Curie, Paris)
      Lundi 6 octobre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Collective behaviors of bacteria
      Interacting biological cells can exhibit collective behaviors (clustering, migration…) that our knowledge at the scale of the single cell cannot fully explain. Such systems will be illustrated through experiments performed on chemotactic bacteria (Escherichia coli) swimming in liquid medium. Their behavior is (...)
    • Mathieu Leocmach (ENS, Lyon)
      Lundi 6 octobre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Yoghurt under stress
      Biogels formed through the self-association of polysaccharide coils, collagen, actin filaments or attractive globular proteins play a major role in biochemistry and microbiology, biological networks and cell mechanics as well as in food science. Their mechanical properties are the physical basis of biomechanics (...)
    • Laurence Ramos (Laboratoire Charles Coulomb, Montpellier)
      Lundi 29 septembre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Novel gels from wheat gluten proteins
      Wheat storage gluten proteins are among the most complex proteins families comprising at least fifty different proteins, with extremely broad polymorphisms. Wheat gluten proteins are moreover largely insoluble in water, rendering their study difficult. Gluten proteins are responsible for the remarkable (...)
    • Elisabeth Guazzelli (Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, IUSTI UMR 7343)
      Lundi 22 septembre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dense suspension rheology, normal stresses, and migration
      Dense or highly concentrated particulate systems are very common in several engineering fields such as civil engineering, food or pharmaceutical industry as well as in geophysical situations such as debris flows, sediment transport, and submarine avalanches. The fundamental problem is to determine the response of (...)
    • Carlos Marques (Institut Charles Sadron, Strasbourg)
      Lundi 15 septembre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Bio-adhesive lipid membranes on DNA carpets : confinement, depletion and localized pressure
      It has been recently shown[1] that when a bio-adhesive phospholipid vesicle is brought into contact with a carpeted surface of end-grafted lambda-phage DNAs, the spreading front of the adhesive patch propagates outwards from a nucleation center, acting as a scraper that strongly stretches the DNA chains. Moreover, (...)
    • Claire Wilhelm (Matière & systèmes complexes, Paris-Diderot, Université Paris Diderot)
      Lundi 8 septembre 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Magnetic nanoparticles as cellular labels : cell imaging, tissue engineering, fate and intercellular transfer.
      Cell therapies and medically oriented nanotechnologies are currently among promising biotechnologies. One promising approach is to associate magnetic nanoparticles with cells in order to supply them with sufficient magnetization to be detectable by MRI, manipulated by magnetic forces, or treated with therapeutic (...)
    • Gregory B. McKenna (Texas Tech University)
      Lundi 7 juillet 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Interrogating the physics of amorphous materials : Mechanics of materials from rubbery to glassy and from the macroscopic to the nanometric
      The mechanics of the materials in the world that surrounds us, at least from the time of Galileo, has fascinated humankind. In the present seminar I will describe our studies of the behavior of amorphous materials with special focus on the use of mechanical measurements to probe fundamental materials physics. (...)
    • Michael L. Falk (Johns Hopkins University, USA)
      Lundi 30 juin 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Nanoscale Models of Single Asperity Friction and Wear
      Understanding friction and wear behavior is limited in part by our lack of a detailed understanding of the atomic scale processes from which energy dissipation and material transfer arise. This has been particularly well illustrated by recent experiments, primarily employing atomic force microscopy (AFM), (...)
    • Christophe Blanc (Laboratoire Charles Coulomb, Montpellier)
      Lundi 23 juin 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Colloids trapped at complex liquid interfaces
      The physics of micron-sized particles trapped at liquid interfaces has been extensively studied from both fundamental and applied reasons. Model systems based on trapped microspheres have thus been used to study the physics of low-dimension systems. In the same time, colloidal particles are now commonly used in (...)
    • Pascal Damman (Laboratoire Interfaces & Fluides Complexes, Université de Mons, Belgique)
      Lundi 16 juin 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Patterns formation through elastic instabilities
      Hydrodynamics instabilities, such as B-enard-Marangoni convection, Rayleigh-Plateau, Rayleigh-Taylor and many others, are well known to produce beautiful patterns (see the book of F. Charru, Hydrodynamics Instabilities). Capillary, viscous and/or inertial forces conspire to generate very regular morphologies. In (...)
    • Sébastien Michelin (Ladhyx, École Polytechnique) : advective effects in the self-propulsion of autophoretic particles
      Lundi 2 juin 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Advective effects in the self-propulsion of autophoretic particles
      Autophoretic particles are able to self-propel in low-Reynolds-number flows using short range interactions between their surface and solute molecules produced or consumed by chemical reaction catalyzed at the particle's surface. The resulting motion is a fundamental example of synthetic particles achieving (...)
    • Yves Meheust (Geosciences Rennes) : Mixing and reaction kinetics in porous media : an experimental pore scale quantification
      Lundi 26 mai 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Mixing and reaction kinetics in porous media : an experimental pore scale quantification
      The mixing of chemical elements and nutrients is a primary controlling process for reactive transport in the subsurface, and consequently for biogeochemical cycles and contaminant transport in subsurface environments. Reaction kinetics measured in well-mixed laboratory reactors are never encountered on the field, (...)
    • Steve Plotkin (UBC Vancouver)
      Lundi 19 mai 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Generalizing Euclidean distance to understand polymer uncrossing and knotting : A physicist's foray into protein folding
      Physics often deals quite rightfully with symmetries and conservation laws, while molecular biology has historically retained little of this distinguished standard. Even the simplest biological macromolecules are aperiodic, have disordered energetics, and have enormously vast phase space relevant at biological (...)
    • Claire Wilhelm (Matière & systèmes complexes, Paris-Diderot) : annulé
      Lundi 12 mai 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Magnetic nanoparticles as cellular labels : cell imaging, tissue engineering, fate and intercellular transfer.
      Cell therapies and medically oriented nanotechnologies are currently among promising biotechnologies. One promising approach is to associate magnetic nanoparticles with cells in order to supply them with sufficient magnetization to be detectable by MRI, manipulated by magnetic forces, or treated with therapeutic (...)
    • Yves Méheust (Géosciences Rennes, Université Rennes 1) : séminaire reporté au 26 Mai
      Lundi 5 mai 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Mixing and reaction kinetics in porous media : an experimental pore scale quantification
      The mixing of chemical elements and nutrients is a primary controlling process for reactive transport in the subsurface, and consequently for biogeochemical cycles and contaminant transport in subsurface environments. Reaction kinetics measured in well-mixed laboratory reactors are never encountered on the field, (...)
    • Elise Lorenceau (Laboratoire Navier, Marne la Vallée)
      Lundi 28 avril 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Spontaneous oil suction by dry aqueous foams
      Detergency, food products, fire fighting or enhanced oil recovery are diverse examples that involve both aqueous foam and oil. Indeed, when using appropriate surfactants, oil and aqueous foam can be intimately mixed without destroying the foam. In most of the experimental studies concerning oils and foams, oil is (...)
    • Marco Rivetti (Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen)
      Lundi 14 avril 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Capillary driven deformations of elastic solids
      Surface tension plays a crucial role in designing the shape of liquid interfaces, like drops or bubbles, especially at small scales. Whenever a liquid interface is put in contact with a soft solid, capillary forces may be strong enough to induce deformations of the solid. In some configurations these deformations (...)
    • Rudolf Podgornik (Ljubljana, Slovenia) : DNA-protein interactions in virus-like nano-particles
      Lundi 7 avril 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      DNA-protein interactions in virus-like nano-particles
      I will present recent experimental results and their theoretical framework on DNA packing in viro, i.e. inside virus capsids and virus-like nanoparticles. I will present some examples of the interaction between the nucleic acids and the proteinaceous envelope in viruses. Confined polyelectrolyte theory and nematic (...)
    • Emmanuelle Rio (LPS, UMR 8502, Université Paris Sud)
      Lundi 31 mars 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Generation and bursting of vertical soap films
      If a frame is pulled out of a soapy solution, a colored ephemeral free standing film will be created. How thick is this film and how long will it last ? These are the two questions we will address. We first show that the film is composed of two zones : a zone of well-defined thickness at the bottom and a thinning (...)
    • Antonin Eddi (PMMH, ESPCI)
      Lundi 24 mars 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Coalescence of drops on a substrate
      When two drops come into contact they will rapidly merge and form a single drop. Here we address the coalescence of drops on a substrate — an elementary process encountered for example during condensation and inkjet printing. We focus on the dynamics just after contact, by characterizing the growth of the thin (...)
    • Ian Williams (Soft Matter Chemistry, University of Bristol)
      Lundi 17 mars 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Hard Discs in Circular Confinement
      The behaviour of materials under spatial confinement is dramatically different from that in the bulk. The exact nature of behavioural modification in confined systems is strongly dependent on the boundary enclosing the system with soft walls inducing different phenomena than similar hard walls. In two dimensions, (...)
    • Marjolein van der Linden (ESPCI, Gulliver)
      Lundi 10 mars 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Formation and crystallisation of long-range repulsive colloidal glasses
      We studied long-range repulsive glasses formed in suspensions of sterically stabilised charged colloidal poly(methyl methacrylate) particles (diameter = 2.23 µm) with low polydispersity (4%) in the low-polar solvent cyclohexyl bromide (dielectric constant = 7.92). Particle interactions were described by a (...)
    • Georges Debregeas (Laboratoire Jean Perrin, UPMC/CNRS)
      Lundi 3 mars 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Brain-wide recording of neural activity at single-cell resolution using SPIM-based calcium imaging
      The optical transparency and the small dimensions of zebrafish at the larval stage make it a vertebrate model of choice for brain-wide in-vivo functional imaging. However, current point-scanning imaging techniques, such as two-photon or confocal microscopy, impose a strong limit on acquisition speed which in turn (...)
    • Raph Seemann (Universität des Saarlandes, Allemagne)
      Lundi 17 février 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      From Foams to Phonons : Dynamic reorganizations of droplet arrangements
      Droplet based microfluidics is well known for high throughput screening and the fabrication of special materials. But droplet based microfluidics also offers a convenient environment to study complex dynamics of dissipative, non-equilibrium many bodies systems as the droplet density and droplet confinement can be (...)
    • Anne-Virginie Salsac (UTC, Compiègne)
      Lundi 10 février 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Fluid structure interaction of a microcapsule in flow
      A capsule consists of an internal medium enclosed by a semi-permeable membrane that controls exchanges between the environment and the internal contents and has a protection role. Natural capsules are cells, bacteria or eggs. Artificial capsules are widely used in industry (pharmaceutical, cosmetic, food industry, (...)
    • Hugues Bodiguel (LOF, Bordeaux)
      Lundi 3 février 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Flow of polymer solutions in porous media : rheology, slippage, confinement and turbulence
      Polymer solutions are used to control biphasic flows in porous media since by increasing the viscosity they tend to prevent fingering and to smooth the permeability heterogeneities. However, several additional phenomena need to be considered, such as non-linear rheology, elasticity and violation of the no-slip (...)
    • Anne Tanguy (Institut Lumière Matière, Lyon)
      Lundi 27 janvier 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Disorder and Acoustic Properties : the vibrations as predictors for plastic damage in glasses
      The mechanical response of glasses is full of unexplained properties, like the composition dependence of its plastic response. In this talk, we will first review the elasto-plastic response of amorphous materials, and then focus on their vibrational properties. The propagation of vibrations in disordered materials (...)
    • Laurent Ponson (UPMC, Paris)
      Lundi 20 janvier 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Designed pinning of peeling fronts in thin film adhesives
      Thin film adhesives are ubiquitous in our daily life, and they have become increasingly important in various applications such as packaging and coating. Despite their apparent simplicity, these systems can reveal a wide range of behaviors resulting from the complex interplay between the deformations of the elastic (...)
    • Patrick Guenoun (LIONS, CEA-Saclay)
      Lundi 13 janvier 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The shape and permeability of polymersomes
      Polymer vesicles, also named polymersomes, are valuable candidates for drug delivery and micro- or nanoreactor applications. As far as drug delivery is concerned, the shape of the carrier is believed to have a strong influence on the biodistribution and cell internalization. Polymersomes can be submitted to an (...)
    • Bruno Andreotti (labo PMMH, ESPCI & Prof. Paris-Diderot)
      Lundi 6 janvier 2014 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Rigidity transition in amorphous media
      Contrarily to cristalline solids, amorphous media (glasses, emulsions, granular media, suspensions, foam, etc) do not present any long range translational order. However, they can resist shear and therefore behave mechanically as solid materials. To make them flow as a liquid, one has, depending on the material, (...)
  • 2013

    • Pascal Hersen (Matière & systèmes complexes, Paris ; Mechanobiology Institute, Singapore)
      Lundi 16 décembre 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Real time control of gene expression in yeast
      Gene expression plays a central role in the orchestration of cellular processes. The use of inducible promoters to change the level of expression of a gene from its physiological level has significantly contributed to understanding the functioning of many regulatory networks. Here, we show that by implementing an (...)
    • Catherine Barentin (Institut Lumière Matière, Lyon)
      Lundi 9 décembre 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Wetting and confined flows of yield stress fluids
      Foams, emulsions, polymer gels are example of every day life yield stress fluids. What makes such systems particularly interesting for applications, but fundamentally difficult to describe, is their intermediate fluid / solid behaviour : at rest they behave like an elastic solid, but they are able to flow like a (...)
    • Robert E. Cohen (MIT, USA)
      Lundi 2 décembre 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Design of Network Structures for Fog Harvesting and Other Applications
      Fog represents a largely unexploited source of potable drinking water. Fog harvesting nets have been used with various degrees of success in more than fifteen countries around the world. In the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile where MIT and Pontifical University of Chile Santiago have an active fog harvesting (...)
    • Maxime Dahan (Institut Curie)
      Lundi 25 novembre 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Probing the target search of individual DNA-binding proteins in mammalian cells
      For many cellular functions, DNA-binding proteins (DBPs) need to find specific target sites in the genome. Facilitated diffusion (FD), namely the combination of one-dimensional motion along non-specific DNA and three-dimensional exploration, is the dominant model for the target search (TS) of DBPs. Yet, this model (...)
    • Cécile Monteux (ESPCI, PPMD-SIMM)
      Lundi 4 novembre 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Reactive liquid interfaces
      Our goal is to control the properties of liquid interfaces (stability of a foam, spreading of a liquid on a surface) by using ‘reactive' amphiphilic molecules. I will give two examples : Photo-responsive bubbles, films and foams. We use surfactants which change their shape under UV light. The light intensity (...)
    • Antonio Celani (Institut Pasteur)
      Lundi 21 octobre 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      The hidden hallmarks of nonequilibrium
      Systems with disparate timescales are ubiquitous in physics and biology. Efficient modeling requires to restrict the description to the slower degrees of freedom by means of a systematic, controlled elimination of fast variables. I will discuss this general issue in stochastic systems with multiple timescales. I (...)
    • A. J. Hudspeth (Rockefeller University)
      Lundi 7 octobre 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Mechanical amplification in the inner ear
      The ear is not a passive receiver of sound ; an active process instead endows our hearing with its remarkable features. The active process amplifies sounds by more than a hundredfold, greatly enhancing our sensitivity to weak stimuli. The ear's intrinsic amplifier additionally tunes our responsiveness to specific (...)
    • Hugo Jacquin (ENS Lyon)
      Lundi 30 septembre 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Static and dynamic theories of the glass and jamming transitions
      The glass and jamming transitions are two distinct mechanism by which atomistic (for the glass transition) and granular (for the jamming transition) systems acquire rigidity on a laboratory time scale. Although the glass and jamming physics are quite old subjects, the development of quantitative theories has been (...)
    • Mathieu Leocmach (ENS Lyon)
      Lundi 23 septembre 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Roles of icosahedral and crystal-like order in hard spheres glass transition
      A link between local structural ordering and slow dynamics has recently attracted much attention from the context of the origin of glassy slow dynamics. There have been a few candidates for such structural order, icosahedral order, exotic amorphous order, and crystal-like order. Each type of order is linked to a (...)
    • Fritz Vollrath (Oxford University)
      Lundi 16 septembre 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Unravelling Spider' Silks
      In silks, proteins are the structural components and water is the solvent. Protein and water combine and separate - under ambient pressures and temperatures - to make the silk thread, which can be so tough that it outperforms even the best man-made fibres. Spider silk is a case in point for outstanding mechanical (...)
    • François Graner (MSC, Université Denis Diderot, Paris)
      Lundi 9 septembre 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dynamics of cellular materials : from foams to biological tissues
      Liquid foams are made of gas bubbles surrounded by water. They are model systems to understand complex cellular materials (made of cells tiling the space), which behave simultaneously as solids and liquids. We have established tools to link the discrete description, at the bubble scale, with a continuous (...)
    • Raphaël Voituriez (LPTMC)
      Lundi 1er juillet 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      First-passage statistics and search strategies
      How long does it take a "searcher" to reach a "target" for the first time ? This first-passage time is a key quantity for evaluating the kinetics of various processes, and in particular chemical reactions involving "small" numbers of particles such as gene transcription, or at larger scales the time needed for (...)
    • Zoya Ignatova (Institute of Biochemistry and Biology, University of Potsdam, Germany)
      Lundi 24 juin 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Non-uniform speed of translation : Stochastic fluctuations or programmed pausing
      Translation of the genetic information from a nucleotide sequence into a functional protein is an essential biological process. The translation machinery, the ribosome, is a central player that translates the genetic information stored in the messenger RNA codon by codon. Multiple auxiliary factors with different (...)
    • Alan Needleman (University of North Texas)
      Lundi 17 juin 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Identifying Material Properties from Mechanical Tests
      Material behavior is quantified in terms of a set of “material properties” with a material property being a value, function or functional that can be used to predict responses under a variety of conditions. What constitutes a material property depends on the theory employed. For example, for isotropic linear (...)
    • James A. Forrest (University of Waterloo, Canada)
      Lundi 10 juin 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dynamical and Mechanical Properties of Glassy Surfaces
      In this talk I will present a number of different approaches we have used to study the surface properties of glassy materials. Atomic force microscopy is used to measure the evolution of the surface of glassy materials (both polymeric and non-polymeric) after it is exposed to different perturbations. One such (...)
    • Vincenzo Vitelli (Instituut-Lorentz, Leiden, The Netherlands)
      Lundi 3 juin 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Shear front propagation and rheology in random elastic networks
      A minimal model for studying the mechanical properties of polymer networks, gels, granular media and glasses is a disordered network of point masses connected by harmonic springs. At a critical value of its mean connectivity, such a network becomes fragile : it undergoes a rigidity transition signaled by a (...)
    • Wiebke Drenckhan (LPS, Orsay)
      Lundi 27 mai 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      And if all bubbles were equal ? Science and applications of monodisperse foams
      Sticking bubbles of equal volume together provides a simple system with complex properties which raise a number of fundamental scientific questions. Into what kind of structures do the bubbles organise themselves and why ? How do these arrangements deform under gravity ? And how can we generate them ? In bridging (...)
    • Jean-Marc di Meglio (MSC, Paris)
      Lundi 29 avril 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Contrôle de la locomotion chez le ver nématode C. elegans
      La capacité à se déplacer est très certainement une des propriétés les plus remarquables de la matière vivante. Cette capacité s'est déclinée au cours de l'évolution sur des modes multiples selon la taille, la forme des individus, et selon leur milieu ou leur habitat. Certains animaux ont même acquis la possibilité de (...)
    • Olivier Couture (ESPCI/Institut Langevin)
      Lundi 22 avril 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Injectable agents for the detection and treatment of cancer by ultrasound
      The Institut Langevin has developed an expertise on the manipulation of waves to improve ultrasound therapy within the brain, measure the elasticity of tissue and perform functional brain imaging. My particular field is concerned with injectable agents that are used to improve the capabilities of ultrasound for (...)
    • Camille Duprat (PMMH, ESPCI)
      Lundi 15 avril 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Elastocapillary flows
      The deformation of elastic structures under capillary forces (elastocapillarity) and their interaction with fluid flow (elastohyrodynamics), are important in many biological, geophysical and engineering processes. To understand these phenomena, I propose three model systems of elastocapillary flows that will be (...)
    • Lydéric Bocquet (Université Lyon 1)
      Lundi 8 avril 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Fluid transport at the nanoscales and blue energy harvesting
      « There is plenty of room at the bottom ». This visionary foresight of R. Feynman, introduced during a lecture at Caltech in 1959, was at the root of numerous scientific and technological developments, taking benefit of the "strange phenomena" occuring at the smallest scales. There remains however a lot to explore, (...)
    • Giovanni Cappello (Institut Curie, Paris)
      Lundi 25 mars 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Mechanics and tumor growth}
      Two key elements control the proliferation of tumors. On the one hand, cancer cells accumulate gene mutations. On the other hand, tumors have to interact with neighboring cells and to push on their surrounding in order to grow. Therefore, mechanical stress is one of the important parameters that have to be taken (...)
    • Christophe Josserand (Institut d'Alembert)
      Lundi 18 mars 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Wave turbulence in vibrating plates
      The concept of wave turbulence has been introduced about 50 years ago in the context of water waves. It consists in an asymptotic expansion of the cumulant terms of the dynamics that leads eventually to a kinetic equation. Beside the thermodynamical equilibrium solutions, this kinetic equation exhibits the (...)
    • Julien Deseigne (ENS Lyon)
      Lundi 25 février 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Molecular transport phenomenon of particles and mixing : building blocks of experimental ecology in oceans ?
      The chaotic laminar advection of colloids in presence of salt is investigated experimentally with microfluidic technology. As long as salt contrasts hold, colloids are carried along saline gradients much faster than the brownian motion. At larger scale, such synergy between salt and colloids give non trivial (...)
    • Stephan Fauve (LPS, ENS, Paris)
      Lundi 18 février 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Reversals of a magnetic field generated by a dynamo process
      Magnetic fields of many planets and stars are generated by a dynamo process, i.e. by electromagnetic induction due to the motion of an electrically conducting fluid. They often display reversals : the magnetic field flips between two states of opposite polarities. This occurs roughly periodically for the solar (...)
    • Stephan Fauve (LPS, ENS, Paris)
      Lundi 18 février 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Reversals of a magnetic field generated by a dynamo process
      Magnetic fields of many planets and stars are generated by a dynamo process, i.e. by electromagnetic induction due to the motion of an electrically conducting fluid. They often display reversals : the magnetic field flips between two states of opposite polarities. This occurs roughly periodically for the solar (...)
    • Maxime Clusel (Laboratoire Charles Coulomb, Montpellier)
      Lundi 11 février 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A Granocentric viewpoint on random packing of spheres
      I will present and discuss a simple statistical model for the random packing of frictionless, originally introduced to find the link between polydispersity and packing structure. We simplify the problem by considering the “granocentric” point of view of a single particle in the bulk, thereby reducing random packing (...)
    • Maxime Clusel (Laboratoire Charles Coulomb, Montpellier)
      Lundi 11 février 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A Granocentric viewpoint on random packing of spheres
      I will present and discuss a simple statistical model for the random packing of frictionless, originally introduced to find the link between polydispersity and packing structure. We simplify the problem by considering the “granocentric” point of view of a single particle in the bulk, thereby reducing random packing (...)
    • Dominique Langevin (LPS, Orsay)
      Lundi 4 février 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Shear rheology of two-dimensional solids
      Many soft solids, such as concentrated suspensions, emulsions, foams, behave in a similar way under an applied shear : they exhibit a Maxwell-type relaxation with a characteristic relaxation time that varies inversely with the applied shear rate. When the storage and loss moduli are measured at different (...)
    • Dominique Langevin (LPS, Orsay)
      Lundi 4 février 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Shear rheology of two-dimensional solids
      Many soft solids, such as concentrated suspensions, emulsions, foams, behave in a similar way under an applied shear : they exhibit a Maxwell-type relaxation with a characteristic relaxation time that varies inversely with the applied shear rate. When the storage and loss moduli are measured at different (...)
    • Jean-François Allemand (LPS, ENS, Paris)
      Lundi 28 janvier 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Some single molecule approaches to DNA replication
      DNA replication is an essential step of the cell cycle. Despite many biochemical studies, physical approaches can still bring new informations on some process of DNA replication. In vitro, using micromanipulation tools, we have shown that force can trigger some DNA polymerases into an exonuclease mode where (...)
    • Alba Marcellan (PPDM-SIMM, ESPCI)
      Lundi 21 janvier 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Nano-hybrid gels : from pure chemical to hybrid networks
      Nano-hybrid hydrogels combine a poly(N,N-dimethylacrylamide) covalent network and physical interactions by strong adsorption of polymer chains at the nanoparticle surface. The resulting mechanical behavior of such highly stretchable nano-hybrid hydrogels highlighted a very unusual combination of properties induced (...)
    • Alba Marcellan (PPDM-SIMM, ESPCI)
      Lundi 21 janvier 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Nano-hybrid gels : from pure chemical to hybrid networks
      Nano-hybrid hydrogels combine a poly(N,N-dimethylacrylamide) covalent network and physical interactions by strong adsorption of polymer chains at the nanoparticle surface. The resulting mechanical behavior of such highly stretchable nano-hybrid hydrogels highlighted a very unusual combination of properties induced (...)
    • Jean-Louis Barrat (Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble)
      Lundi 14 janvier 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Investigating mechanical properties of disordered solids with computer simulations
      Many solids around us are disordered : glassy or semi crystalline polymers, oxide or metallic glasses, nanocomposites, are common examples. In disordered systems, the link between macroscopic mechanical properties and the nanostructure of the materials is far from being understood. I will describe some of the (...)
    • Jean-Louis Barrat (Université Joseph Fourier, Grenoble)
      Lundi 14 janvier 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Investigating mechanical properties of disordered solids with computer simulations
      Many solids around us are disordered : glassy or semi crystalline polymers, oxide or metallic glasses, nanocomposites, are common examples. In disordered systems, the link between macroscopic mechanical properties and the nanostructure of the materials is far from being understood. I will describe some of the (...)
    • Sascha Hilgenfeldt (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA)
      Lundi 7 janvier 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Understanding and manipulating microbubble streaming flows : size-sensitive sorting and mixing
      Ultrasound-induced oscillation of microbubbles gives rise to intense, steady streaming flows. We show that the flow patterns can be flexibly and interactively shaped by the superposition of a transport flow and adjustment of driving amplitude and/or frequency. In this way, sensitive selection, focusing, and (...)
    • Sascha Hilgenfeldt (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA)
      Lundi 7 janvier 2013 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Understanding and manipulating microbubble streaming flows : size-sensitive sorting and mixing
      Ultrasound-induced oscillation of microbubbles gives rise to intense, steady streaming flows. We show that the flow patterns can be flexibly and interactively shaped by the superposition of a transport flow and adjustment of driving amplitude and/or frequency. In this way, sensitive selection, focusing, and (...)
  • 2012

    • Hirokazu Tanimoto (Institut Curie)
      Lundi 17 décembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A simple force-motion relationship of migrating cells
      In this talk, we would discuss about a force-motion relationship of migrating eukaryotic adherent cells. Biological cells migrate without net forces, which is a consequence of force-free and negligible inertia conditions (Purcell, 1977). This indicates that to elucidate a force-motion relationship, unlike in cases (...)
    • Hirokazu Tanimoto (Institut Curie)
      Lundi 17 décembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      A simple force-motion relationship of migrating cells
      In this talk, we would discuss about a force-motion relationship of migrating eukaryotic adherent cells. Biological cells migrate without net forces, which is a consequence of force-free and negligible inertia conditions (Purcell, 1977). This indicates that to elucidate a force-motion relationship, unlike in cases (...)
    • Séminaire : Karim Benchenane (Laboratoire de neurobiologie, ESPCI)
      Lundi 10 décembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Role of sleep in memory processes
      The two-stage model of memory consolidation developed by Gyorgy Buzsaki proposed that encoding occurs during awake hippocampal theta oscillations (5-10Hz) and consolidation during slow wave sleep (SWS), involving reactivations that occur during hippocampal 200Hz oscillations called the sharp-waves-ripples (...)
    • Séminaire : Karim Benchenane (Laboratoire de neurobiologie, ESPCI)
      Lundi 10 décembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Role of sleep in memory processes
      The two-stage model of memory consolidation developed by Gyorgy Buzsaki proposed that encoding occurs during awake hippocampal theta oscillations (5-10Hz) and consolidation during slow wave sleep (SWS), involving reactivations that occur during hippocampal 200Hz oscillations called the sharp-waves-ripples (...)
    • John F. Brady (California Institute of Technology, USA)
      Lundi 3 décembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Chemical Swimming
      The design of nanoengines that can convert stored chemical energy into motion is an important challenge of nanotechnology, especially for engines that can operate autonomously. Recent experiments have demonstrated that it is possible to power the motion of nanoscale and microscale objects by using surface (...)
    • John F. Brady (California Institute of Technology, USA)
      Lundi 3 décembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Chemical Swimming
      The design of nanoengines that can convert stored chemical energy into motion is an important challenge of nanotechnology, especially for engines that can operate autonomously. Recent experiments have demonstrated that it is possible to power the motion of nanoscale and microscale objects by using surface (...)
    • James R. Rice (Harvard University)
      Lundi 19 novembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dynamics and hydrology of rapid ice sheet motion
      Two questions are discussed which arise in evaluating possible scenarios of accelerated deglaciation in Greenland and Antarctica. A first question is, how fast can a glacier imbibe a meltwater lake, and what are the aftereffects ? It focuses on Greenland where, as spring commences, a broad swath of more (...)
    • James R. Rice (Harvard University)
      Lundi 19 novembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Dynamics and hydrology of rapid ice sheet motion
      Two questions are discussed which arise in evaluating possible scenarios of accelerated deglaciation in Greenland and Antarctica. A first question is, how fast can a glacier imbibe a meltwater lake, and what are the aftereffects ? It focuses on Greenland where, as spring commences, a broad swath of more (...)
    • Lev Truskinovsky (Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France)
      Lundi 12 novembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical physics of the power stroke in skeletal muscles
      The classical Huxley-Simmons model of muscle contractions exhibits unusual statistical properties due to the presence of long range elastic interactions. Those include non-equivalence of the soft and hard device ensembles, negative equilibrium stiffness and anomalously slow kinetics in the soft device. Our data (...)
    • Lev Truskinovsky (Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, France)
      Lundi 12 novembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical physics of the power stroke in skeletal muscles
      The classical Huxley-Simmons model of muscle contractions exhibits unusual statistical properties due to the presence of long range elastic interactions. Those include non-equivalence of the soft and hard device ensembles, negative equilibrium stiffness and anomalously slow kinetics in the soft device. Our data (...)
    • Oliver Baeumchen (McMaster University,Hamilton, Canada)
      Lundi 5 novembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Can Polymers Slide ? New Insights from Capillary-Driven Flows in Thin Films
      The motion of small amounts of liquid on the micro- and nanoscale is of enormous scientific interest and additionally holds great technological potential, e.g. in lab-on-a-chip applications for pharmaceuticals, biological analysis or chemical reactions. When downsizing devices, interfacial and confinement effects (...)
    • Oliver Baeumchen (McMaster University,Hamilton, Canada)
      Lundi 5 novembre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      Can Polymers Slide ? New Insights from Capillary-Driven Flows in Thin Films
      The motion of small amounts of liquid on the micro- and nanoscale is of enormous scientific interest and additionally holds great technological potential, e.g. in lab-on-a-chip applications for pharmaceuticals, biological analysis or chemical reactions. When downsizing devices, interfacial and confinement effects (...)
    • Fernando Peruani (Universite de Nice Sophia Antipolis)
      Lundi 29 octobre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      From bacteria to collective motion in heterogeneous media
      First part - I will show some recent experimental results with three mutants of the gliding bacterium Myxococcus xanthus. We found that mutants lacking biochemical signaling and moving unidirectionally exhibit collective motion in the form of large moving clusters at intermediate densities, while self-organize (...)
    • Fernando Peruani (Universite de Nice Sophia Antipolis)
      Lundi 29 octobre 2012 de 11h15 à 12h15 - Bibliothèque PCT - F3.04
      From bacteria to collective motion in heterogeneous media
      First part - I will show some recent experimental results with three mutants of the gliding bacterium Myxococcus xanthus. We found that mutants lacking biochemical signaling and moving unidirectionally exhibit collective motion in the form of large moving clusters at intermediate densities, while self-organize (...)
    • Soft Matter Days 2015

      Gathering ESPCI persons working in the field of soft matter in order to share their research activity in a relaxing atmosphere

      Version française

      On Jul(...)

      General recommendations for the speakers

      The audience is often heterogeneous - because of the wide range of scientific topics covered in the lab - so planning a talk for a broader audience would be preferred. The seminar is in English, and speakers are thus invited to prepare their slides in English.

      The seminar starts at 11:30 AM. The speaker is asked to arrive in the lab at least 15 minutes in advance to set up their computer. The talks last typically 45 minutes, and are followed by a discussion time.

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