ESPCI web site
The laboratory
PMMH is one of the historical research labs of ESPCI, born as the laboratoire Hydrodynamique et Mécanique Physique (HMP) founded by Étienne Guyon in 1978, a couple of years after P. G. De Gennes was appointed director of ESPCI. In the early 1990s the lab became a CNRS research unit and adopted the name Physique et Mécanique des Milieux Hétérogènes (PMMH), a forewarning of the pluri-disciplinary development that was to come in the next decades, beyond fluid and solid mechanics and embracing new avenues in soft matter, macroscopic and non-linear physics. The 2000s in particular consolidated this diversification with a steady hiring period, new teams joining the lab with subjects ranging from granular matter and statistical physics to biophysics. This growth and evolution was accompanied by an intense collaboration with the Parisian science universities. In 2005, the lab signed its association with the universities formerly known as Paris 6 (Université Pierre et Marie Curie) and Paris 7 (Université Paris Diderot), now Sorbonne Université and Université Paris Cité, respectively. This led to the current configuration of PMMH as a joint research unit (Unité Mixte de Recherche) with four parent institutions: CNRS, ESPCI Paris–Université PSL, Sorbonne Université, and Université Paris Cité.
Today PMMH brings together about a hundred people (researchers and research professors, doctoral and post-doctoral students, engineers, technicians and administrative staff) who study physics and mechanics topics at everyday scales (from micrometers to kilometers). With a strong interdisciplinary dynamics, the laboratory combines experimental, theoretical, and numerical approaches, while actively collaborating on international research projects addressing environmental and biological questions. From bacterial swimming to ice sheet fracturing under the effect of waves, including the nucleation of a dewdrop, this involves studying phenomena that fall under mechanics (from fluids to solids, including so-called soft matter) from a physics perspective. In recent years, this research has led to numerous projects studying the behavior of living matter (cell biomechanics, fish swimming and insect flight, root growth) and environmental physics (cloud formation, sea foam), adding field work to our usual combination of table-top experiments and physical modelling. Click on the Research link to know more about all this.
