The Matter and Complex Systems laboratory is a research structure of the CNRS and University Paris-Diderot gathering 65 permanent researchers (theorists and experimentalists), 20 engineers and technicians and more than 50 PhD students and post-docs.
The laboratory is organized in five large research groups :
Its originality and creativity are unique in the landscape of French research owing to :
The 24 permanent members participating to the SEAM Labex have a deep experience of interdisciplinary work at the border between Mechanics, Biology and Soft Matter Physics from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale, including the use of nanotechnology and single molecule techniques. They are leader in their field concerning the physical-chemistry and bio-applications of magnetic nanoparticles, the development of stimulable functional materials (with applications to energy saving), the experimental and theoretical studies (including simulations) of the mechanical and rheological behaviour of complex disordered materials such as foams, colloids and complex fluids and gels, the hydrodynamics of wetting and drying processes with applications to coating on simple or complex nanostructured surfaces, the study of complex biomimetic or natural (diatomea) biomaterials. The teams of MSC develop models of statistical mechanics covering a large range of scales, from molecules or elementary mesoscales to macroscopic scale in order to describe materials often characterized by their randomness, disorder and complex mechanical properties.
The final goal is to described the rheological and dynamical behaviours of foams, tissues, glass, sands, colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions or their mixtures starting from the interactions between their elementary components. These works are strongly coupled to experimental studies. The equipment is the following : two light scattering set up, 2 AFM, several rheometers, 3 ultra-fast video camera, 1 confocal microscope, several optical microscopes (equipped for fluorescence studies), two optical tweezers set-up. We benefit from of a complete mechanical workshop.