Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes

February 1st 2021. 11h30

There will be a live diffusion with Zoom. Contact Michael Berhanu to attend the video seminar.

Looking for graphene-like behaviors in soft matter

Maxime Lanoy

Laboratoire de Physique de l’école Normale Supérieure, PSL, Paris

Presented work performed at Institut Langevin, PSL in collaboration with Fabrice Lemoult, Antonin Eddi and Claire Prada.

Abstract : In 2004, Novoselov and his coworkers isolated a single sheet of graphene for the very first time. A new class of materials, Dirac metals, was brought to light. These materials have tremendous conducting properties. For example, electrons were reported to travel as if they didn’t have a mass. Since that day, replacing traditional semiconductors by Dirac metals in computer architectures has become a leading challenge for condensed matter physicists.

The many similarities between the Schödinger and d’Alembert equations offer the possibility to look for analogous transport effects for classical waves (photons or phonons).

In this seminar, I will consider the case of elastic waves and propose a hunt for graphene-like behavior within the realm of soft materials. I will expose an experimental investigation highlighting the critical coupling arising from a particular set of mechanical (soft, incompressible) and geometrical (ribbon shape) conditions. Soft ribbons are numerous in mammalian organisms. As a consequence, describing their unique vibrational dynamics is essential for understanding actual physiological processes such as the sound transduction operating in our inner ear.