The researcher at the Center for the Development of Materials and Structural Studies, in Toulouse, is a pioneer of work on molecular machines.
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What game is he playing? In the basement of his laboratory of the Center for the Development of Materials and Structural Studies (CEMES), in Toulouse, Christian Joachim, assisted by Umaamahesh Thupakula, a postdoctrant, is perplexed. Like a Mikado lover, thanks to orders placed from his keyboard to an imposing machine, he pushes an invisible stick to the naked eye. Without success. He pulls it. It does not work either. He tries with a double push. Same. He then scribbles his next strategy on a sheet of paper. Will it be the right one? Will he manage to achieve the feat of raising on a step of twenty nanometers high this stick 50 nanometers-a nanometer is worth a billionth of meters, less than the diameter of a haircut coupé In 100,000?
achieving it would appeal to this pioneer of a discipline first baptized biotic in the 1970s, then molecular electronic a few years later. The idea is to succeed in concentrating in a single molecule the functions of the components of current electronics, from nanometric shaping of materials such as silicon. Switch, wire, amplifier, transistor, additional …, all on a molecule, of a size ten to a hundred times smaller than current materials.
If you don’t really understand your funny game, it is also difficult to put the researcher, who has just been 65 years old, in a box. Chemist ? Physicist? Even a mathematician? A little of the three for this CNRS silver medalist in 2001.
five -legged sheep
Since he manipulates molecules, he should be classified as a chemist. “But he has a physicist’s vision, corrects Erik Dujardin, CNRS researcher at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory Carnot in Burgundy, who has long worked in Cemes with him. He is not interested in their usual property of crystallization or change of phase, But he imagines how their state of energy will make it possible to carry out a function. He even invented names for these molecules, outside the official nomenclatures, which makes the eyes of the chemists spread. “” I like to draw sheep to Five legs on the board to stimulate my colleagues who will try to make them, “says Christian Joachim, who remembers having imagined, still a student, a first molecular thread on the table of his room. “It is sure that he likes to draw! But the chemists sometimes made him go down to earth,” recalls Jean-Pierre Launay, former director of CEMES.
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