Virgile Thiévenaz
Physique et Mécanique des Milieux Hétérogènes, ESPCI Paris
E-mail : virgile /at/ vthievenaz.fr
Last update on 19/03/2025 at 17h50 (CET)
Welcome to my website!
I am a physicist, specialized in fluid mechanics and soft matter, CNRS researcher at ESPCI's PMMH laboratory, in Paris, France. My research interests include flows of complex fluids, freezing at the capillary scale and plant physics.
Ice often contains tiny bubbles, full of the air dissolved in water and expelled during freezing. Those bubbles are never perfectly spherical; in some cases they can be quite elongated. This is easily observed in an ice cube out of the freezer. In my recent article, On the shape of air bubbles trapped in ice, published in PNAS, and resulting from a collaboration with Alban Sauret, Jochem Meijer and Detlef Lohse, I describe the shape of these bubbles with a parsimonious model, as resulting from freezing and from the diffusion of dissolved gas. I show how a single differential equation can describe the vast zoology of bubbles.
On November 26th, 2024, I received the Scientific Photography Award in the contest Plus belle la mécanique (Beautiful Mechanics), organized by the Association Française de Mécanique and the Fédération Photographique de France, for my work on the dislocation of drops of suspension.
Our article “The onset of heterogeneity in the pinch-off of suspension drops” has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For the non-specialists, UCSB’s Harrison Tasoff just wrote a paper on the subject.
On November 22nd, 2021, Alban Sauret and I received the Milton Van Dyke award from the Gallery of Fluid Motion of the APS for my video on the fragmentation of viscous compound filaments. The video was ranked first by the jury, and received coverage in the APS popularization magazine, Physics. All this on my birthday!
I also ran twice in the poster contest, with my own work on the pinch-off of complex suspensions and with Deok-Hoon Jeong’s PhD work on the dip-coating with bidisperse suspensions.
My drops of viscoelastic suspensions are in FY Fluid Dynamics!
Thursday, March 25th, I presented my research on the pinch-off of visco-elastic particulate suspensions at the Rencontres du Non-Linéaire 2021.
This video was presented at the 2018 Gallery of Fluid Motion. It summarizes the main topics of my PhD.
