Professor Lydéric Bocquet from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris and the Collège de France, is the Onsager Professor 2025. He will receive the Onsager Medal and will give his lecture this Friday, November 21st, 2025 at 11.15 in Auditorium S7 in “Sentralbygg 2”
He will talk about:
The molecular mechanics of fluids: from ionic memory to quantum plumbing
Abstract:
Lyderic Bocquet, https://www.phys.ens.fr/~lbocquet
CNRS and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris
The emerging field of nanofluidics explores the molecular mechanics of fluids at the smallest scales. This realm of the “infinitely small in fluidics” is the frontier where the continuum of fluid dynamics meets the atomic nature of matter, and even its quantum nature. Observations unveil a cabinet of curiosities of singular properties, from frictionless flow to neuromorphic behaviors.
In this talk, I will discuss experimental and theoretical results that we obtained recently on the transport of water and ions in nanopores, both in 1D nanotubes and 2D channels obtained by van der Waals assembly. I will focus on two phenomena: first the emergence of memory in quasi–two-dimensional water channels rooted in the 2D Wien-Onsager effect, enabling the development of ion-based neuromorphic computing; then the emergence of hydro-electronic couplings, explaining the strange flows of water in carbon nanotubes. This opens new perspectives for nanoscale fluid transport, which I will illustrate on the phenomena of flow tunneling across walls, and (ion-free) hydro-electronic energy conversion.
About The Onsager Professorship at NTNU
The Onsager Professorship is each year awarded to an outstanding researcher, to honor Lars Onsager.
Lars Onsager was a Norwegian-American chemist and physicist, who started out as a student at NTH (Norwegian Institute of Technology, later NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology), and later went on to win The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1968 for his work done in 1931 on irreversible thermodynamics.
The Lars Onsager Lecture and the Lars Onsager Professorship are each year awarded by the Onsager Committee at NTNU.