Alexandre Baron is Maître de Conférences at the University of Bordeaux in Physics. He conducts his research at the Paul Pascal Research Center (CNRS). Member of the META team, he has contributed to the fields of nanophotonics, nonlinear optics, photonic crystals and plasmonics. More recently, his activity has focused on metamaterials. They are artificial materials with extraordinary optical properties that inherit their properties from the details of the nanostructuring of the building blocks that compose them rather than from their chemical nature. The invisibility cloak, the perfect lense or perfect light absorbers are remarkable achievements of the metamaterials community.
His project for the IUF proposes to design and produce such building blocks that exhibit tailored light absorption and scattering properties that will enable the realization of metamaterials. They will be fabricated using self-assembly techniques inherited from soft matter physical chemistry as well as nanochemistry. This new generation of systems could take the form of inks that may be used to form materials for a wide variety of applications such as passive radiative cooling, spatial and temporal control of light with very compact components, or even for the realization of low command-power devices for laser technologies.
His project for the IUF proposes to design and produce such building blocks that exhibit tailored light absorption and scattering properties that will enable the realization of metamaterials. They will be fabricated using self-assembly techniques inherited from soft matter physical chemistry as well as nanochemistry. This new generation of systems could take the form of inks that may be used to form materials for a wide variety of applications such as passive radiative cooling, spatial and temporal control of light with very compact components, or even for the realization of low command-power devices for laser technologies.