The present invention relates to the field of optical devices, and more specifically to the field of active optical devices

We present experimental and theoretical results on the electrical conductivity and other properties of carbon nanotubes.

We investigate freely expanding sheets formed by ultrasoft gel beads, and liquid and viscoelastic drops, produced by the impact of the bead or drop on a silicon wafer covered with a thin layer of liquid nitrogen that suppresses viscous dissipation thanks to an inverse Leidenfrost effect. Our experiments show a unified behavior for the impact dynamics that holds for solids, liquids, and viscoelastic fluids and that we rationalize by properly taking into account elastocapillary effects. In this framework, the classical impact dynamics of solids and liquids, as far as viscous dissipation is negligible, appears as the asymptotic limits of a universal theoretical description. A novel material-dependent characteristic velocity that includes both capillary and bulk elasticity emerges from this unified description of the physics of impact.

In our work we report the measurement of non-equilibrium interfacial tension of polymer and hard sphere suspensions in contact with their own solvent. By visualizing fingering instability (VF) in radial Hele-Shaw geometry, appearing when the solvent displaces suspensions of colloids or polymers, we measure interfacial tensions in function of the volume fraction of the suspended objects, showing that the internal degrees of freedom of the particles drive the low volume fraction behavior (Figure 1). Our results support the existence of a positive tension between miscible fluids, confirm the quadratic scaling predicted by Korteweg [4] for long linear and crosslinked polymers and show a positive rapidly growing tension for hard sphere suspensions up to maximum packing, whose description necessitates a theoretical framework going beyond the classic square gradient model. We rationalize our findings assuming the suspension/solvent interface in local thermodynamic equilibrium, computing explicitly the square gradient contribution to the interfacial tension for polymer/solvent and simple molecular liquid mixtures and proposing a phenomenological model capturing the compositional dependence of the interfacial tension for large concentration gradients. Finally we include and analyze data reported in literature and obtained via spinning drop tensiometry that validate the model and we propose the analysis of fluid dynamic instability as a new tool to probe interfacial stresses.

Graphene oxide dispersions are easily obtained in water. Due to the high aspect ratio of the flakes, liquid crystalsthen forms a nematic phase at moderate concentrations [1,2], which allows to design various composites withnanoparticles. Preparing organized materials and thin films from these dispersions however requires a good controlof the liquid crystal ordering during the deposition and the drying of the films.Here we have focused on mechanical instabilities that are frequently observed in thin graphene liquid crystallayers, when they are submitted to weak constraints. We have shown how to create and stabilize large-sizedperiodic textures (millimeter scale, see fig.1). The patterns have been characterized under optical and electronicmicroscopies. They result from the peculiar elastic and rheological properties of the graphene oxide liquid crystals.Our results also clarify why long-standing hypotheses on the presence of exotic phases [1] at large concentrationsare present in the literature.

The aim of the present work is to study by means of thermodynamic measurements, i.e. isotherms of adsorption and desorption of water and Infrared (IR) spectroscopy, the effect of the interlayer cations on the mechanism of adsorption-desorption of water in the case of a montmorillonite exchanged with alkaline-earth metals. For the first time, the net isosteric heat of water adsorption and desorption is determined from isotherms recorded at three temperatures. The net isosteric heat is a very useful parameter for getting more insights into the sorption mechanism since it provides information about the sorption energy evolution which can be complementary to that obtained from structural or gravimetric measurements. The homoionic montmorillonite samples are prepared from purification and cationic exchanged in aqueous solution of the raw material, i.e the reference SWy-2 Wyoming material. XRD at the dry state and elemental chemical analysis confirm that the treatment does not deteriorate the clay structure and yield the expected homoionic composition. The adsorption and desorption isotherms measured at various temperatures show that the nature of the interlayer, i.e. exchangeable, cation changes the adsorbed/desorbed amount of water molecules for a given water relative pressure. The total amount of water adsorbed at = 0.5 follows the cation sequence Ca>Mg>Ba. Although the adsorption isosteric heat also follows the cation sequence Ca>Mg>Ba, that of desorption obeys a slightly different sequence Ca~Mg>Ba. This discrepancy between the adsorption and desorption heat is due to the higher irreversibility of water sorption process in the Ca exchanged montmorillonite. Finally, analysis of the IR spectra recorded at room temperature and under a primary vacuum reveals that the amount of adsorbed water follows the same sequence as that of the isosteric heat of adsorption and shows the coexistence of liquid-like and solid-like water confined in the interlayer space.