The 2023 Daniel Guinier Prize, awarded by the SFP, goes to Marlone Vernet for his PhD in nonlinear physics titled “Turbulence, Transport, and Thermoelectricity in Liquid Metals,” conducted at LPENS under the supervision of Christophe Gissinger. His PhD, predominantly experimental, explores the field of turbulence in electrically conducting fluids, with astrophysical implications (accretion disks) and industrial applications (liquid thermoelectricity).
His work focuses on investigating the transport properties of turbulence in an electrically conducting liquid within a thin disk. For the first time in a laboratory setup, he successfully generated a turbulent flow in Keplerian rotation, modeling astrophysical accretion disks around black holes and proto-stars. This research, published in Physical Review Letters in 2022, identified a transfer mechanism where only turbulent fluctuations contribute to transport, thus explaining the rapid formation of black holes.
The second, very different, aspect of his thesis explores the thermoelectric effect between two superimposed layers of liquid metals (gallium/mercury) subjected to a radial temperature gradient. Due to the difference in the thermoelectric powers of these two liquids, an electric current is generated between the fluids. This represents the first experimental observation of a thermoelectric effect between two fluids, a phenomenon well-known for solids (the Seebeck effect). This new type of thermoelectricity produces abnormally high current densities at the interface (10 to 100 times greater than in solids). This discovery opens up new prospects in several fields, particularly for the development of liquid metal batteries. The results of this PhD work have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS 2024).
Author affiliation:
Laboratoire de physique de L’École normale supérieure (LPENS, ENS Paris/CNRS/Sorbonne Université/Université de Paris)
Corresponding author: Marlone Vernet
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