Nonlinear physics is a discipline that takes its roots from the work of Henri Poincaré in the 19th century. It has been developed in the 1960s through the observation, the development of dynamical systems theory and numerical experimentation. It is a multidisciplinary science that has many fields of application. A common denominator in these fields is the use of concepts of instability, bifurcations, excitability, chaos and the emergence of complex dissipative structures. Our research team is currently developing the following research topics: Biophysics, Optical-non-linear, Hydrodynamic and Crystal growth.
News -
- January 2027 — New ANR PROJET AI and ocean dynamics. A new research activity will explore semi-supervised diffusion approaches for mid-latitude oceanic circulation within the ANR PINOT project. The work brings together A. Venaille (ENS Lyon), E. Simonnet and L. Li (INPHYNI). More information here.
- October 2026 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship. Chiara Calascibetta have been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship for the DragREACT project. Starting in October 2026, the project will combine numerical simulations, physical modelling and reinforcement learning to explore new strategies for controlling turbulence and reducing drag, together with Jérémie Bec.
- July 2026 — New team leadership. Eric Simonnet took over the leadership of the team in July 2026. Many thanks to Sergey for leading the team over the past years.
- June 2026 — Publication. Together with W. Ruffenach and N. Valade, Eric Simonnet developed a measure-theoretic formulation of spontaneous stochasticity as a statistical selection mechanism arising in singular limits of deterministic dynamics. The corresponding manuscript is under consideration at Nonlinearity.
- June 2026 — Conference. Eric Simonnet gave the plenary talk on renormalization group approach: “A cheat code to Feigenbaum–Mailybaev RG: From shell models to all systems?” at the Mathematics of Multiscale Modeling conference at IMPA in Rio de Janeiro. Video here.
- January 2026 — New ANR PROJET. The ANR-funded TURBO project (“Turbulence without limits: unravelling anomalies, unpredictability and flow breakdown”) was launched in January 2026 under the coordination of Jérémie Bec. The project investigates turbulence in the high-Reynolds-number limit, focusing on the connections between singularities, conservation anomalies, irreversibility, intermittency, loss of uniqueness and spontaneous stochasticity. As part of the project, two postdoctoral researchers will be hired for two years each, along with a PhD student. More information here.
- January 2026 — New team member, Vincent Bertin joined the team as Chargé de Recherche CNRS. Welcome.