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ESPCI Paris - PSL
ESPCI Paris - PSL is a major institution of higher education (a French "Grande École d’ingénieurs"), an internationally renowned research center, and a fertile ground of innovation for industry. Founded by the City of Paris in 1882, for over a century the School has attracted leading scientific innovators like Nobel Prize laureates Pierre and Marie Curie, Paul Langevin, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, and Georges Charpak, who continue to contribute to the institution’s international reputation. The School’s culture of excellence remains as vibrant as ever. Fully 60% of (...)
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Welcome to PSL University! By joining ESPCI paris- PSL, you also join PSL university and its 17 000 students. You get access to an exceptionnel education in sciences, arts, litterature and culture. From Bachelor to PhD, academic programs cover all the fields from sciences, human and social sciences, engineering and arts. PSL targets high-potential students, from every horizon, an accompagnies them towards excellence. Your education will be operated by ESPCI paris - PSL, and your degree delivered by PSL University. Discover the education programs of PSL University Ingénieur ESPCI Paris - (...)
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ESPCI Paris - PSL is home to 10 research laboratories (all of them being endorsed and jointly sponsored by CNRS) operating at the frontiers of scientific knowledge and experimental know-how, extending from fundamental research to innovation, and covering areas ranging from polymers to telecommunications, from nanobiophysics to organic synthesis, from environmental science to biomedical imaging, from neurobiology to microfluidics, from soft matter to quantum physics, and from colloids to prototyping for industry. ESPCI researchers publish around 500 scientific articles in leading (...)
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ESPCI: generating innovation and jobs ESPCI is also known for its capacity to encourage major innovations. Did you know that as well as radium, polonium, actinium and lutecium, many other objects from our everyday lives were first discovered or created at ESPCI, like the neon tube, the black box, the quartz watch, sonar, wireless technology, self-healing rubber or even ultrafast ultrasound imaging? An entrepreneurial culture More and more graduates create their own companies after graduation or after their PhD. This capacity to innovation is highly valued today. ESPCI courses (...)
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The International Relations of ESPCI Paris - PSL aim to support the School’s policy and propose key strategies in response to the specificities of the school. In line with its identity, ESPCI Paris attaches great importance to collaborating with international institutions that capitalize on interdisciplinary research, innovation, basic and applied sciences. This central thread stimulates both didactic and scientific partnerships. ESPCI is a component school of PSL University. The objective of the international relations is to enable ESPCI Paris to develop the mobility of (...)
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ESPCI Paris is at the center of a large network of partnering agreements. These are three-way institutional partnerships - notably with the City of Paris, and ParisTech -, as well as academic, scientific and industrial partnerships enriched by the School’s energy, expertise and creativity. The commitment to transdisciplinarity extends beyond the School’s Paris campus. Today’s complex scientific and technological issues often demand a broader view and collaboration, with the deployment of complementary, hybrid approaches and the sharing of best practices in order to pool resources and (...)

A Turing machine with wave memory

Print version of this article

07/10/2016

Computers possess a number discrete memories containing digital information. This quantization is fundamentally related to the fact that the information is stored using discrete entities, such as electrons for computers or DNA bases for living organisms. Is it possible to imagine a memory storing an analog information at the elementary level? This is what a collaboration between researchers from Matter & Complex System Laboratory (Paris Diderot University, CNRS) and Langevin Institute (ESPCI Paris, CNRS) have just shown using peculiar objects composed of a droplet and a wave packet.

It is possible to sustain a droplet bouncing on the surface of a bath of the same liquid when the latter is vertically vibrated. Each bounce produces a surface wave which results in the propulsion of the droplet. The droplet is piloted by this dynamical coupling between the droplet and its associated wave field. The researchers have shown that this unique object stores the information in its wave field and could perform the elementary operations of writing, storing, reading and erasing. It thus could be interpreted as a Turing machine, an abstract machine capable of performing all tasks accomplishable by computers.

Publication:
“Wave-Based Turing Machine: Time Reversal and Information Erasing” de S. Perrard et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 094502 (doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.094502)

Focus: “Surface Waves Store Bouncing Droplet’s History” de Philip Ball, Physics 9, 101 (2016)

Contact: emmanuel.fort@espci.fr

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