Friday, 1 September 11:00am – 12:00pm

This seminar will be delivered in Chemistry Lecture Theatre 2 and Online (Zoom) Please email chemistry.researchsupport@sydney.edu.au for zoom link and password.

Speaker: Dr Matthieu Roché, Université Paris Cité/Australian National University

Host: Prof. Chiara Neto

Title: Wetting of soft gels

Abstract: In this talk, I will give an overview of recent work I have carried out with my colleagues on problems involving interfaces between media where at least one of these media is a complex material, be it from a mechanical or physicochemical standpoint. I will dedicate most of my talk to the work we have carried out in recent years on the wetting of soft gels. In particular, I will describe the combination of experiments and theory that we performed that, in the light of recent new insights from the community into the nature of the surface of these materials, provide support to recent models. I will point to extensions of our investigations to a broader class of substrates, from purely viscoelastic soft gels to liquid-infused surfaces.

Bio: Dr. Matthieu Roché is interested in capillary phenomena in complex systems. He has been a CNRS researcher at Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes (Université Paris Cité, CNRS UMR 7057) since 2014. His current interests include the wetting of soft polymeric materials, the spreading of granular suspensions and thermal surface bubbles. He is currently a visiting researcher at the Department of Materials Physics at the Australian National University, where he works with Vince Craig and Nicolas François.