The design of new families of nanocarbon materials, from bottom-up approaches (notably for carbon nanorings, CPPs, azafullerenes, and hybrid systems), to chemical and structural modification of existing nanocarbons, such as selective filling of collapsed carbon nanotubes cavities. We are also interested in carbon nanostructure formation processes (such as fullerenes in space), and ways that different nanostructures can be modified (e.g. dislocation cores).

As well as the nanocarbons themselves, we are innovating in ways that nanocarbons can be used as templates, creating previously unknown material phases due to nanoconfinement (for example inside carbon nanotubes).

We rely strongly on computational modelling tools, and local, national and international collaborations.

The confinement of ionic liquids allows the properties of ionic liquids to be exploited while benefiting from containment as a solid. The diffusion properties in the resulting nanoporous ionogels (the nanopores seen here as "inverse nanoobjects") are similar to those of liquids. Through the variation of the chemical and topological characteristics of many ionogels, we have broadened our understanding of the behavior at the interface between ionic liquids and host networks by examining the dynamics of the ions, their interactions with each other, as well as their interactions with the host network. We focus on the fundamental understanding of self-organization, anomalous diffusion and surface-liquid interaction in these nanoconfined environments, with technological implications (energy storage and optical devices).

To go further : [Ionogels], [Micro-supercapacitors], [Ionic liquids]

In recent years, the major advances in our knowledge of nano-objects have mainly come from better resolution towards the atomic scale of spectroscopic, microscopic and modelling techniques. Our project revolves around the idea of combining our expertise around these techniques to achieve a complete understanding of the physical properties of individual nano-objects at the atomic scale. This approach strongly mixes experiment and modelling.

To go further : [Super-resolution], [Super-résolution of nanowire]

Electro-optical polymers (EOP) obtained by dispersing a chromophore in a polymer matrix are of great interest for the development of high performance photonic devices. However, their performance is limited by aging.
As part of Zahraa Jradi's PhD work, we are exploring the effect of adding nanoparticles to EOP to improve performance on the one hand, to reduce the aging effect on the other hand. The polymer chosen is the PMMA / DR1 system. The nanocomposites are formed with TiO2 or BaTiO3 nanoparticles.

To go further : [PMMA/DR1/TiO2 nanocomposites]