In 2007, the French government created twelve “Advanced Reasearch Networks” to strengthen research ties among French scientists working in related areas and to foster innovative new science. These regionally based networks link laboratories united by their common interests.  One of the two Physics networks is the “Triangle de la Physique,” comprising 35 laboratories in an area south of Paris that could, with a little imagination, be described as roughly triangular.

Click on map for enlarged image

Within this network are many institutions involved in advanced research on hard and soft condensed matter— among them the three institutions that initiated the Paris node of ICAM:  the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides d’Orsay (LPS), represented by Henri Alloul;  the Centre de Physique Théorique (CPHT) condensed-matter theory groups of the Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau), represented by Antoine Georges; and the Service de Physique Théorique (SPHT) of CEA Saclay, represented by Catherine Pépin, together with two Paris institutions:  the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris (ENS), represented by David Bensimon; and the Ecole de Physique et de Chimie Industrielle, represented by Nicole Bontemps. 

While the Triangle embraces a wider range of scientific topics than just condensed matter or complexity, including matter out of equilibrium, nanophotonics, and extreme light intensity, it lists among its seven core topics of research four that fit within the scope of ICAM, wholly or in part:

• Coherence and quantum entanglement: from atoms to mesoscopic systems
• Complex matter:  systems, materials, and dynamics
• Strongly correlated matter
• Spintronics

It also has very similar goals to those of ICAM, which include creating a new dynamic within the scientific community that will cross administrative boundaries and generate innovative projects. 

Triangle institutions are encouraged not only to collaborate with each other, but also to welcome, for shorter or longer periods of time, senior and junior researchers from all over the world, to stimulate existing research activities and to favor the emergence of new ones.  They also administer grants to junior scientists, including post-docs and Ph.D. students, to support novel and original research.  And finally, their goals include a mission to promote their research to the larger population.

This research environment is highly sympathetic to the goals and work of ICAM and has allowed the Paris node to thrive.  The Triangle has indeed decided to support the ICAM Paris node. The five laboratories of this consortium have been very active in European ICAM events.  They have organized four I2CAM summer schools at Cargèse (Corsica), two on correlated matter and two on soft condensed matter.  A fifth summer school, on correlated matter, is scheduled for 2009.   Henri Alloul, of Orsay, has also teamed with Peter Littlewood of Cambridge to coordinate activities among all the European nodes of ICAM.  One of the outcomes of these efforts has been the support given by the European Science Foundation to a European virtual network for the study of emergent behavior, supervised by Peter Littlewood and Antoine Georges  (See in this issue the article on INTELBIOMAT). 

One of the most visible successes of the Triangle was the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2007 jointly to P. Grünberg of Jülich and to Albert Fert, a researcher at the Université de Paris-Sud.  Fert performed the research for which he was honored at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides in Orsay, in collaboration with a research team of the industrial group Thalès, also of the Triangle.  He has since joined the Thalès group laboratory where he is working on spintronics. 

By Karie Friedman, ICAMNews, October 2008