Doctoral Training: Nonequilibrium Physics in Nanoconfinement

Training session
September 14, 2026 - September 25, 2026
During the past century, significant progress has been made in expanding our atomistic understanding of systems in equilibrium. However, to understand life and much of the technology that sustains life, we need to be able to understand and control non-equilibrium processes. The past two decades have witnessed a paradigm shift away from studying equilibrium behaviour to the study of spatial and temporal organisation far from equilibrium.
This development is not just driven by scientific curiosity but by the realisation that a sustainable society is one that minimises waste in the form of heat and materials. To achieve these goals, we need to understand how living organisms combine robustness with selectivity and energy efficiency, and we have to learn how to transpose the underlying biological design principles to processes with inanimate, nano-scale building blocks.

Recent developments in the design of nano-pores have demonstrated that very large gains in the separation efficiency are possible by an appropriate nano-scale functionalization of the channels through which transport takes place. Transport through nano-pores is almost always coupled transport, coupling fluxes that would be independent in bulk materials.

This session is organized by:
Lydéric BOCQUET, École Normale Supérieure-PSL
Jure DOBNIKAR, University of Ljubljana
Roland NETZ, Freie Universität Berlin
Ignacio PAGONABARRAGA, University of Barcelona

More information can be found on the session's website.
 
Published on  September 30, 2025
Updated on  February 12, 2026