The Laboratoire de Physique des Solides (Laboratory of Solid-State Physics; LPS) is a joint research unit (UMR 8502) between the Université Paris-Saclay and CNRS. It is mainly affiliated to the CNRS Institute of Physics and the 28th section of the National Council of Universities.
It gathers about a hundred researchers and faculty members, both experimentalists and theorists, and the research activity is supported by about sixty engineers, technicians and administrative staff. The laboratory covers a wider variety of topics than its name suggests, and it actually seeks to address the whole diversity of condensed-matter physics. The research activity is organized along three main thrusts, or “axes”, each of which involves roughly the same number of scientists:
- New electronic states of matter
- Physical phenomena in reduced dimensions
- Soft matter and physics-biology interface
In the first axis are grouped both experimental and theoretical studies related to the properties of correlated fermions (superconductivity, magnetism, metal-insulator transitions…).
In the second axis, we find the activities related to the broad sense of “nanosciences”. Globally, the apporach is to consider the fundamental properties, when the dimensions of an object become as small as certain characteristic distances (coherence length, mean free path, …).
The third axis extends the concept of “soft matter” to biological systems. The topics range from complex systems to living tissues, from liquid crystals to foams, through polymers or granular systems. These physical studies at the interface involve physical chemistry and biology.