Jean-Yves Bigot - Biography#

Jean-Yves Bigot is Research Director at CNRS, deputy director of IPCMS, director of the recently created "laboratory of excellence" NIE (Nano-Objects Interacting with their Environment). He received his PhD in 1984 and Habilitation in 1987 from University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg. He joined CNRS in 1984 as Researcher and became Research Director in 1996. He then spent two years in the USA successively at AT&T Bell Laboratories (New Jersey) and at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (California). He studied, in the team of Charles Shank and Daniel Chemla, the ultrafast dynamical processes occurring in molecular systems in solution and the electron dynamics in semiconductor quantum wells.

Back in Strasbourg in 1990, J.-Y. Bigot developed at the IPCMS a research program on the dynamical processes taking place in polymers and in metallic materials. Several results obtained then are groundbreaking ones. For example, he showed the existence of an ultrafast conformation change in a polymer backbone, he studied the vibronic wave-packet associated to the C=C chemical bond, he investigated the interaction between plasmons and quasi-particles in metallic nanoparticles and he demonstrated the possibility of modifying the magnetization of ferromagnetic materials at the femtosecond time scale. This discovery has been the starting point of a very prolific research field in magnetism: “Ultrafast Magnetization Dynamics”. His current research interests are dedicated to the study of the dynamical processes in metallic nanostructures, using the techniques of femtosecond optical and magneto-optical spectroscopy.

He has taught several master classes in Physics including Nonlinear Optics and Light Matter Interaction. He was the leader of the Group of Nonlinear Optics and Opto-electronics at IPCMS from 2000 until 2007. In 2008 he received the silver medal from CNRS in Physics for the originality, quality and importance of his research. In 2009 he received an Advanced Research Grant from the ERC (project ATOMAG) and is the leader of two programs of Excellence (The Laboratory of Excellence NIE: Nanostructures Interacting with their Environment and The Project of Excellence UNION: Ultrafast Optics and Nanophotonics”). He is also associate professor at EWHA University (Department of Physics) in Seoul, South Korea since 2011.