Institut Charles Sadron News

The first edition of the "Gallery of Soft Matter" was organised this year at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society (Chicago, March 14th-18th, 2022): the goal of this event is to show the aesthetics and elegance of soft matter physics through current research topics. The poster "Bending Plateau's laws" submitted by members of the MIM and TSP teams at ICS is one of the entries that received a "Gallery of Soft Matter award", among posters and videos that show impactful images bringing artistic and scientific interests. The poster shows how the introduction of an elastic ribbon in a bubble column modifies the equilibrium structure of the bubbles, as a function of the bending rigidity of the intruder. The photograph highlighted in the poster combines the natural beauty of soap bubble colours and the scientific interest of a system allowing to quantify the competition between elasticity and capillarity in a bubble assembly. The research work associated with this picture is part of the projects on elastocapillarity in foams-fibres systems developed with the arrival of Aurélie Hourlier-Fargette at ICS. It allowed to understand those deformations with both experiments and theoretical modelling, and has been recently published in an article in Soft Matter journal (Manon Jouanlanne et al, 2022).