In nature, some motile microorganisms have evolved in such a way to respond to environmental light stimuli, essentially allowing them to find better living conditions.
In the lab, it is possible to engineer bacterial cells so as to make them photokinetic, that is, to control their speed by means of the light shone on them: these cells move faster when exposed to high-intensity light, whereas...
Chirality is a symmetry property of matter, which can emerge at any length scale, from galaxies to snail shells and even to subatomic particles. Chiral light-matter interactions have been investigated for two centuries, leading to the discovery of many chiroptical processes used for discrimination of enantiomers. Whereas most chiroptical effects result from a response of bound electrons,...
Exotic, extremely radioactive nuclei play a key role in the nucleosynthesis processes responsible for heavy element production in cataclysmic events in the universe, such as recently observed in the binary neutron star merger detected via gravitational waves [1] . The nucleosynthesis yields depend on the details of the underlying quantum structure of these nuclei, largely unknown as such...
The state of a quantum system is completely determined by its wave-function or density-matrix, which evolve according to an equation of motion. When the system is composed of many interacting particles, the many-body problem increases exponentially the size of those objects, which eventually cannot be stored in the memory of a computer. For decades researchers approached the issue by...
Muon tomography consists in using cosmic muons to probe structures in a non-invasive nor destructive way. The successful development of muon telescopes using Micro-Pattern Gaseous Detectors over the past decades triggered the interest of many industrials for such technology. However, telescopes are limited in terms of compacity and angular acceptance which are performances with high...
Fluid-structure interactions are the basics of the complexity of Aerodynamics, enhancing resonance in structures and turbulence in flows. Even simple systems like a pendulum can become more complex, as a hysteretic bistability shows up for a range of flow velocities when the pendulum confronts a flow. This is predicted by a simple balance of weight and aerodynamical forces, but non stationary...
Gravitational waves (GW) are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, emitted by compact accelerating objects. On September 2015, the first direct detection of GW from a binary black hole merger initiates the field of GW astronomy and opened a new window on the Universe. On August 17, 2017, Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors jointly detected gravitational-waves resulting of the merger of...
Low frequency waves turbulence developing in magnetized plasma columns are well known to trigger important radial transport, a major issue for fusion devices. We present here analysis from very fast imaging of low frequency waves in a magnetically confined plasma column.
Our experimental set-up consists in a cylindrical chamber containing an Argon plasma column of 10 cm diameter of...
Quantum thermodynamics follows the approach of classical thermodynamics to study the energy exchange during the interaction of quantum systems. It defines the quantum counterparts of heat, work, and entropy, and it provides equations that constrain the variation of these quantities. The Maxwell's demon Gedankenexperiment portrays a tiny being that uses the information on individual molecules...
Cavity quantum electrodynamics (CQED) is a field where the emission properties of atomes are modified by coupling with modes of cavities. Using Rydberg atoms coupled with ultra high finesse microwave cavities, the CQED team of LKB achieved a strong coupling regime, where the interaction of atoms with light is much stronger than decoherence. The very long life-time of the cavities made it...
The aim of this work is the calculation of vibrational properties of hydrogen-rich materials where Nuclear Quantum Effects play an important role. The computational methods are based on Molecular Dynamics simulations combined with Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) for the electronic part and a Langevin thermostat correlated according to the covariance matrix of QMC nuclear forces. In particular, we...
We investigate the role of cell contractility and molecular adhesion in the formation of the blastocoel during early mouse embryo development, a fluid-filled lumen that positions the first axis of symmetry of the embryo. We show that hundreds of micron-sized fluid filled cavities appear throughout the entire embryo on basolateral (adhesive) sides of cells, fracking cell-cell contacts. Via a...
High-speed data transfer through optical fibres using spatial multiplexing is practically limited by modal crosstalk. Instead of considering this modal crosstalk as a limitation, we here harness its mode mixing to process quantum optical information. We implement a programmable linear optical network based on the concept of inverse photonic design exploiting the technology of wavefront...
Inflation theories elegantly address a number of problems raised by the standard Hot Big Bang scenario, however one of its major predictions, the existence of a stochastic background of cosmological gravitational waves, is yet to be confirmed. Currently the most promising, if not the only, way to achieving this is through the observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization....
The SOLEIL synchrotron is the French national third generation light source storage ring, which provides photon beams to 29 beamlines from infrared to hard X-rays. Future synchrotron sources aim at increasing the brilliance by decreasing the electron beam emittance, down to the natural diffraction limit: they are Diffraction Limited Storage Rings (DLSRs). In order to improve its performance...
the Experimental and theoretical research related to improving the transfer of A number of authors have carried out heat using nanoparticles and their results showed that the heat transfer of nanofluids is very important in this context our work presents a critical model for improved heat transfer This work is done on the basis of a 2D numerical dimension of heat transport models, which can be...
The properties of extremes of a stochastic process/time series of a given duration $T$ are of fundamental importance in describing a plethora of natural phenomena. For example, this time series may represent the amplitude of earthquakes in a specific seismic region, the amount of yearly rainfall in a given area, the temperature records in a given weather station, etc. The study of extremes in...
Many phenomena remain poorly understood in amorphous materials such as plasticity and shear banding, their brittleness and disordered structure making it difficult to study them experimentally. As a consequence, we use model two-dimensional Lennard-Jones glasses and measure their local yield stress, a measure of the local softness, as presented in [1]. This method is nonperturbative and is...
