Watching interfaces at nanometric scales: Jean Comtet awarded with the Édouard Branly Prize

Jean Comtet, CNRS researcher at the SIMM laboratory, is co-recipient of the Edouard Branly 2021 prize. For the past twenty years, this prize has been awarded to young researchers for their remarkable research work in the physical sciences. As an experimental physicist, Jean studies the behavior of soft matter at the ultimate scales: the nanometric and molecular scales. If probing these scales requires the development of advanced experimental techniques, this endeavor is rewarded by the observation of often completely unexpected phenomena, or the possibility to rationalize behaviors observed at larger macroscopic scales.

This prize rewards in particular his recent work on transport phenomena at solid/liquid interfaces, observed at the elementary scale of the single charge. These discoveries have been allowed by the use of novel optical techniques based on single-molecule super-resolution microscopy, allowing to access to the dynamics of interfaces at nanometric scales. This work is at the heart of the activities he is initiating in the SIMM laboratory and which focus more generally on the dynamics of complex interfaces in soft matter.

Annonce : Remise Prix Branly 2021