Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
1932–2007, Paris, France, Orsay, France
French physicist awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physics for generalizing the theory of ordering transitions to liquid crystals and polymers, founding the field of soft matter.
Born in Paris and trained at the École Normale Supérieure, de Gennes began in nuclear physics at Saclay before turning to magnetism and superconductivity at Orsay. In 1968 he founded the Orsay liquid-crystal group, showing that nematic–smectic transitions could be described by the same Landau-type theories as superconductors. At the Collège de France (from 1971) and as director of ESPCI (1976–2002), he unified the physics of polymers, colloids, interfaces and wetting into what he christened 'soft matter' in his Nobel lecture.
Nobel-winning work
De Gennes showed that the methods invented for 'simple' order phenomena — superconductivity, magnetism — generalize to complex matter. His 1972 prediction of analogies between smectic-A phases and superconductors (the 'twist grain boundary' idea followed), his book The Physics of Liquid Crystals (1974), and the reptation model (1971) describing how entangled polymer chains snake through one another, became standards.
Scaling Concepts in Polymer Physics (1979) introduced scaling and renormalization ideas into polymer science, explaining chain size R ~ N^ν, screening in solutions and dynamics — unifying soft matter under a few powerful principles.
Workplaces: Collège de France, ESPCI Paris, Paris-Saclay University (Orsay)
France