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Christophe Gissinger
Associate professor at Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS Paris)
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I am an associate professor (Maitre de conférences) at Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) and a researcher at the Laboratory of Physics of ENS (LPENS), in the Nonlinear Physics group.
Since September 2020, I am a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), and I am entitled to supervise research [HDR] since 2018.
Aside from research, I teach fluid dynamics, instabilities, statistical physics, thermodynamics and experimental physics (undergraduate and master).

Research interests

My research focus on non-linear and statistical physics, mostly within the framework of fluid mechanics. In particular, my current research interests lie in the field of magnetohydrodynamics, i.e. the study of the dynamics of electrically conducting fluids. I combine laboratory experiments, theory and numerical simulations to study various phenomena such as flow instabilities, magnetic field generation, dynamical systems, chaos, pipe flows and turbulence. Below are some typical examples of my current interests:

  • Waves and instabilities

  • Waves are ubiquitous in both nature and industrial systems. Most of the time, they are closely related to the generation of instabilities in the flow. We use laboratory experiments to study the stability of such flows and the associated wave dynamics > more details here...

  • Astrophysical Fluid dynamics

  • Astrophysical fluid dynamics deals with the application of fluid dynamics to the motion of fluids encountered in space, such as planetary or stellar interiors, accretion disks and galaxies. Thanks to the growing amount of telescope observations and space missions in recent years, whole sections of the theory of such flows are now actively debated. In our group, we combine laboratory experiments, theory and numerical modeling to understand the mechanisms involved in some of these astrophysical systems > more details here...

  • Turbulence

  • The study of turbulence is one of the most active research area. We developed several laboratory experiments in order to adress various questions related to turbulence, like the transport properties of turbulent flows, the dimensionality of turbulence or its statistical properties. > more details here...

  • Chaos and nonlinear dynamics

  • In several physical problems, a modelization using a few coupled differential equations is very useful to understand the non-linear dynamics of complex systems. I am interested in fluids dynamics situations in which a low dimensional behavior is observed, despite the apparently large number of degrees of freedom. It is still unclear why and how some very complex and turbulent systems can be correctly reproduced by extremely simple models. > more details here...