Conférence - Mark Bowick - Nonabelian Topological Defects

Jean-François Joanny

Matière molle et biophysique

Collège de France

Année 2024-2025

Conférence - Mark Bowick - Nonabelian Topological Defects

Mark Bowick

Deputy Director, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California Santa Barbara

Mark Bowick est invité par l'assemblée du Collège de France sur proposition du professeur Jean-François Joanny, chaire Matière molle et biophysique.

The line defects of three dimensional uniaxial nematics have a simple abelian algebra governing their interactions and so simply pass through one another. I will discuss, instead, biaxial nematics for which the fundamental group is non-abelian. As a result they exhibit topological entanglement/rigidity, trivalent junctions and associated networks, and stable bound states of pairs of disclinations. They can be experimentally realized in chiral nematics or in hybrid molecular-colloidal systems, realizing the notion of topological rigidity envisaged 50 years ago by Poenaru and Toulouse.

Mark Bowick

Mark Bowick was born in New Zealand, obtained his B.Sc.(Hons) from the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from Caltech in 1983. This was followed by a Research Associate position in the Particle Theory Group at Yale, winning the First prize award in the 1986 Gravity Research Foundation Essay Competition. This was followed by a postdoctoral position in the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT. He joined the faculty of the Physics Department at Syracuse University in 1987, holding an Outstanding Junior Investigator award from the Department of Energy from 1987-1993 and becoming Full Professor of Physics in 1998. His research career has been split between theoretical high-energy physics and condensed matter (principally soft matter). He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (Division of Condensed Matter Physics) in 2004 and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022. He received the Chancellor's Citation for Exceptional Academic Achievement in 2006 (Syracuse University) and the William Wasserstrom Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Advising in 2009 (Syracuse University). From 2011-2016 he was Director of the Soft Matter Program at Syracuse University.

Since 2016 Bowick has been Deputy Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (Santa Barbara) and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Physics at the University of California Santa Barbara.