Complex material relates both to the actual object of study, such as complex fluids (polymers, surfactants, colloid particles, suspensions, porous and granular media, reactive fluids, etc.), complex surfaces (rough fractures), and to disordered systems (a large number of possibly contradictory degrees of freedom wherein frustration gives rise to glassy behaviours), and complex dynamics (nucleation/growth, complex flows, confined flows, turbulence, collective behaviours) involved in mixing processes, instabilities, growth fronts or reactions.
Statistical physics plays a unifying role in all these problems in which it is possible to pass from individual properties to collective behaviours. In this set of themes, two lines of strength emerge from the partner teams: confined fluids and disordered matter. Our project will consist of exploring new properties originating from confinement, on the one hand, and on the other hand developing experiments with which the emergence of dynamic length scales and collective behaviours may be studied in different examples of disordered systems (glasses, spin glasses, granular media, turbulence, etc.).