General information
Organisation
The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) is a key player in research, development and innovation in four main areas :
• defence and security,
• nuclear energy (fission and fusion),
• technological research for industry,
• fundamental research in the physical sciences and life sciences.
Drawing on its widely acknowledged expertise, and thanks to its 16000 technicians, engineers, researchers and staff, the CEA actively participates in collaborative projects with a large number of academic and industrial partners.
The CEA is established in ten centers spread throughout France
Reference
SL-DAM-26-0537
Direction
DAM
Thesis topic details
Category
Condensed Matter Physics, chemistry, nanosciences
Thesis topics
Coarse-grained simulations and viscoelastic behavior of polymeric photoactuators: a bottom-up strategy
Contract
Thèse
Job description
Mechanical actuators, like muscles, are materials that can change their own macroscopic shape to perform mechanical work when submitted to an external stimulus, such as light irradiation. The resulting photoactuators (PA) are based on a variety of photoactive materials including gels, crystals, liquid crystal elastomers (LCE) or polymer films forming polymeric PA (PPA). This project focuses on PPAs, usually made of elastomers in which photoactive molecules are inserted. To optimize the PPA properties, a precise understanding of the behavior of these materials at all scales is necessary. PPAs are viscoelastic by nature and therefore the continuous scale modeling of their behavior requires the knowledge of some specific mechanical properties, like the time-dependent relaxation moduli G(t) and K(t). At the supramolecular scale, these relaxation moduli can be obtained by Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations using the Green-Kubo relation [3]. However, for these materials, the G(t) and K(t) timescales far exceed the accessible timescales of MD (on the order of thousands of seconds vs. microseconds). This PhD work has thus two main objectives to reduce this gap :(i) temperature-accelerated dynamics, (ii) anisotropic coarse-grained (CG) simulations.
University / doctoral school
Physique en Île-de-France (EDPIF)
Paris-Saclay
Thesis topic location
Site
DAM Île-de-France
Requester
Position start date
01/09/2026
Person to be contacted by the applicant
Pineau Nicolas
nicolas.pineau@cea.fr
CEA
DAM/DPEM//DPEM
CEA DAM Ile de France
Bruyères-le-Châtel
91297 Arpajon
0169264000
Tutor / Responsible thesis director
Lemarchand Claire
claire.lemarchand@cea.fr
CEA
DAM/DPEM//DPEM
CEA DAM Ile de France
Bruyères-le-Châtel
91297 Arpajon
0169264000
En savoir plus
https://www-lmce.cea.fr/team/condensed_matter_physics/lemarchand.html
https://www-lmce.cea.fr/