Since the beginning of the industrial era, prototyping has been an important stage for manufacturers as a preliminary step before mass production. With the rise of Computer Science and recent advances of intensive computation, industry is progressively shifting from tangible prototypes to fully numerical and virtual prototypes, with the goal of reducing costs and time during the R\&D phase. Over recent years, the emergence of 3D printers has enabled virtual prototyping methods to take into account, at an early stage, some degree of fabricability, especially regarding the shape of a manufactured object. However, beyond its shape, predicting the final appearance of a virtual prototype remains a challenge of great importance in many domains (e.g., furniture, textile, architecture). The challenge resides mainly on the fact that the final appearance of an object is dependent on its shape, the material(s) applied on its surface, as well as the viewing and lighting conditions. The VIDA project aims at removing several scientific locks related to appearance prediction in the context of fabrication, by establishing a framework for the direct and inverse design of material appearance for objects of complex shapes. Because the manufacturing processes are constantly evolving, our goal is to establish a framework that is not tied up to a single fabrication stage. To provide a rich variety of possible appearances, we target multi-layered materials. We will ensure that every step in our framework is validated by either predictive simulation and/or measurements of the appearance. To illustrate the fabricability of our results, material samples as well as object samples will be fabricated locally or out-sourced to Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne or Saint-Gobain Recherche, and their appearance will also be validated with specific devices developed at the Institut d’Optique-LP2N. VIDA has the ambition to connect three distinct fields: Computer Graphics, Instrumental Optics, and Fabrication. Consequently, VIDA will have an impact in all industries (e.g., Material, Design, Luxury or Automotive) involving designing and manufacturing prototypes, because they have a large demand on virtual prototyping to reduce their costs and development time. For the long term, VIDA results could bring benefits to high-end users who will be given the possibility to print customized objects of desired shapes, thanks to the printing revolution, but who will also aspire to control the final appearance of such objects. VIDA results will be disseminated to the scientific community and the industry. To the scientific community, we will disseminate our results in terms of publications, open-source software, and measurement databases. To the manufacturing industry, we will disseminate all technology data (operational parameters of the different machines) that are related to the fabrication of materials that could be transferred in order to file patents with industrial partners. To the software industry, we will disseminate algorithms and methods that could be transferred to specialized companies producing rendering engines (e.g., The Foundry, Lumiscaphe). Finally, we intend to disseminate our measurement devices by providing a service of measurement of appearances, including fully certifying and validating shapes of objects.

The NanoMiX project has the ambition to establish a new expertise at the interface between nanophotonics and mesoscopic optics, by tackling the study of complex nanostructures, more specifically disordered ensembles of exotic, strongly resonating nanoparticles interacting efficiently between themselves via a layered substrate (e.g., thin-film stacks supporting guided modes). We believe that these “complex optical stacks” have a high scientific and technological potential thanks to the richness of their optical properties, coming from the individual nanoparticles, their interaction with the geometry and their mutual interaction via a controlled disorder. The NanoMix project aims to: (i) Develop the theoretical and numerical tools that will allow analyzing such multi-scale systems in their whole complexity; (ii) Develop new knowledge and concepts on mesoscopic phenomena in complex optical stacks; (iii) Learn engineering complex nanostructures to obtain new optical effects. This project – very exploratory – goes into many challenges of modern nanophotonics and mesoscopic optics, such as the control of light coupling/decoupling in planar nanostructures or the formation and engineering of localized optical modes in disordered media. Beyond the expected increase of knowledge, the obtained results could have important outcomes on technologies, such as the efficient use of light energy in photonic devices (photovoltaics, organic LEDs, …), the realization of surfaces producing new, targeted visual effects for interior design or augmented/mixed reality applications, or the enhancement of light-matter interaction for quantum optics or bio-sensing. NanoMiX is a “JCJC” project led by a young researcher who has a rare double expertise in nanophotonics and optics of disordered media, and aspires to develop this still-unexplored research topic by building up a new theoretical team at LP2N.

Regenerative medicine is a burning stake for public health. The growing expectations for tissues that are engineered from patient’s cells and no longer from donors is a major challenge. Although culturing small pieces of tissues in vitro is nowadays mastered, scaling up the process in terms of tissue size hasn’t been achieved yet, mainly because this implies providing nutrients to each cell of the construct. This observation points vascularisation as the main key to unlock the situation. The MUSCOVADO project ambitions to provide a framework to engineer biological tissues that could be grown up to centimetre-size, by means of its design that integrates a multiscale vasculature. Briefly, the approach consists in assembling building-blocks of micro-vascularised tissues with meso-scaled engineered vessels that we hypothesise to connect to each other. This is directly applicable to medicine, but also serves to investigate angiogenesis and vasculogenesis in a relevant in vitro system.

Mainly composed of fibrillar collagen, highly organized at different hierarchical scales, connective tissues (e.g. cartilage, skin, bone, arteries, cornea) provides structural scaffold to many organs and determine the micro-environment properties influencing cell adhesion and migration. Despite common constituents, these tissues present widely different mechanical behaviors and functions. It exists extensive literature dealing with the mechanical characterization of individual collagen fibrils and with the assessment of tissues’ macroscopic response. Yet, the interplay between these scale is left obscure, mostly due to the lack of appropriate techniques to probe them simultaneously. For example, the origin of the highly nonlinear strain-dependent stiffening of collagen network remains unknown, let alone how these macroscopic behaviors arise from the micro-architecture of the tissue. In this context, deciphering the complex role of collagen network organization in the formation of macroscopic biomechanical properties of living tissues is of utmost interest, since they play an intricate role in determining physio-pathological behavior of these tissues. Over the years, Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) microscopy has imposed as the gold standard for collagen imaging in live thick tissues, enabling label-free visualization of fibrillar distribution, with high intrinsic specificity and sub-micron spatial resolution. In parallel, the recent advent of Brillouin microscopy has revolutionized the field of biomechanics, allowing contact-less and non-invasive mapping of elastic properties, with sub-micron resolution, in soft and heterogeneous medium. Leveraging these recent advances HaBIm seeks to implement an innovative microscope, coupling state-of-the-art SHG and Brillouin imaging while enabling simultaneous mechanical assay under the microscope. Pairing macroscopic stress/strain measures, microscopic viscoelasticity probing and nanoscopic tissue reorganization, this cutting-edge instrument will provide new insights into the multiscale relationship between collagen architecture and mechanical behavior. Moreover, a Raman spectrometer, enabling to map the chemical content in the sample, will be added to contextualize the complementary information. Upon operational, this platform will be validated on mouse vocal folds at various macroscopic deformation, to characterize the collagen organization and viscoelastic properties in depth in the different layers of the tissue, from epithelium to the vocalis muscle, through the lamina propria. As a proof-of-concept, monitoring fine changes after laser-induced lesions will demonstrate the potential of this method to characterize local alteration of the tissue at microscopic scale and the resulting defective mechanical properties. Lying at the interface between advanced optical microscopy and biomechanics of connective tissues, HaBIm aims to close the instrumental gap between SHG imaging and Brillouin microscopy to correlate multiscale mechanical measurements and structural imaging. Associated with advanced image analysis approaches, this project will pave the way for a complete mechanical characterization of connective tissues. Going beyond the state-of-the-art, this project will establish an analytical framework to bridge the multiple scale involved in the complex morpho-functional relationship of live tissues. Such methodology holds the potential to unveil new insights into the crucial role of viscoelastic properties in determining physiological (e.g. development, aging) and pathological behaviors (e.g. genetic diseases, wound healing). Potential applications include monitoring early-stage alteration in the context of tumor progression and metastatic invasion. Moreover, this approaches could guide the design and validation of biomimetic sample used in tissue engineering.

Atomic physics and solid-state devices have developed on nearly parallel tracks for several years. Surely, the breakthroughs of ultra-cold quantum gases are owing to the impetuous development of photonic devices and, reciprocally, new solid state devices are tightly related to the progress in quantum gaz control. But at this level each domain has regarded its companion merely as a tool provider. Over the last decade, however, the concept of hybrid systems where the quantum mechanical properties of coupled systems cannot be disentangled has dawned and then spurred a blossoming research activity. In this context, I envision a leap forward by engineering Bose and Fermi quantum gaz dynamics in close proximity, and strongly interacting with, nano-structured surfaces that generate sub-wavelength lattice potentials with tailored electromagnetic properties. Such hybrid simulator will bridge the gap between solid state (1A) and optical (500 nm) crystals, therefore exploiting simultaneously regimes free of far field fundamental limitations and cold atom controllability to enter deeply into strongly correlated quantum phases. In position space, for example, the diffraction limit can be bypassed in the near field and electromagnetic field can be shaped to generate arbitrary sub-wavelength patterned potentials that will experimentally allow to observe quantum magnetic properties. Complementarily, in momentum space, the dispersion relation that is bound to stay constant in vacuum can be tailored by structured matter to enter slow light regimes wherein atom-light coupling is enhanced. This could lead to new perspectives to engineer field mediated long range atom-atom interactions that are of major interest to unveil exotic quantum phases exhibiting long range correlations. This hybrid system represents a new class of quantum simulators that opens fascinating perspectives at the cost of a challenging experimental implementation. My main objective in the AUFRONS project is to pioneer the required innovative concepts and experimental tools to control and boost the dynamics of quantum gaz trapped in an electromagnetic lattice environment tailored by nano-structured surfaces. In addition to my expertise on hybrid systems, I plan to carry the project AUFRONS that mix quantum gases physics, near field optics and condensed matter physics with collaborators expert of the related research fields.