Bernard Sapoval

Research Director at C.N.R.S.

Image: Experimental propagation of heat from a fractal radiator. The propagation occurs here in two dimensions in a liquid crystal film. The colours represent temperature and the coloured line is an approximation of the Minkovski neighbouring.
Publications Abstracts e-mail: bernard.sapoval@polytechnique.fr
Version Française
Fractal sea-coasts
 Self stabilized coast erosion videos
 Fractal noise barrier wall

Site under construction, only the publication list is up to date.

Link to Physics Survey of Irregular Systems

Key Words:

Fractals, fractal and irregular electrodes, fractal diffusion fronts, invasion fronts, irregular and fractal membranes, irregular and fractal resonators, fluctuations, noise, nuclear relaxation, porous membranes, corrosion, percolation, percolation in a gradient, Knudsen diffusion, irregular and fractal acoustic cavities, glasses, porous silicon, fractal drums, amorphous materials, heterogeneous catalysts, irregular quantum wells, porous catalysts

Curriculum: Head of the Condensed Matter Physics lab at Ecole Polytechnique (1976- 1993).
Chairman of the Physics Department at Ecole Polytechnique (1978-1983).
"Fellow of the American Physical Society" (1995).


Scientific Activity:

Since 1983 I have focused on the physics of fractals and irregular systems and structures and properties in general. The main themes are:

  • The fractal structure of diffusion fronts

  • The concept of percolation in a gradient

  • Random walks in a probability gradient as a method to calculate the threshold of percolation in two dimensions

  • The concept of intercalation and invasion noise, observed, for example, in the absorbance of a liquid in a porus substance

  • Prediction of the fractal dimension of certain corrosion figures

  • The possibility of increasing sharpness in fuzzy images by a numerical analysis using the concept of percolation in a gradient

  • Calculation of the way a fractal model will respond to external stimulus.

  • The correspondace between the electrochemical response of an irregular electrode and the absorbance of a membrane of the same geometry in diffusion
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