RCMO group

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Research in materials, components and optical thin films technologies

The RCMO team of the Institut FRESNEL is interested by all fields of optical thin films and optical interference filters, with various associated fields of application, including space, lasers, microscopy/imaging and colorimetry.

It is currently composed of 14 people, including 2 professors from the Ecole Centrale Marseille, 5 CNRS staff including 1 Research Director, 1 Research scientist, 2 Engineers and 1 Assistant Engineer, and 7 PhD students. Its research activities focus on the study of thin film materials, from the design of multilayer components, to the controlled fabrication of these structures, to their characterization.

To carry out its activities, the RCMO team has benefited since 2014 from the Espace Photonique, a 250 m² space of clean and gray rooms bringing together in a single suitable place all the means of preparation of substrates, deposition of thin films (evaporation and sputtering) and characterization of components (spectrophotometry, profilometry, optical near field microscopy).

These works are carried out within the framework of various financings. During the last 8 years, the researchers of the team have been involved (as coordinators or partners) in 10 CNES R&T projects, 6 ANR projects, 2 H2020 projects (including 1 ITN), 1 A*MIDEX, 2 CNRS projects (including 1 80|PRIME), 2 regional projects and several dozens of projects with French and international industrials. Its research and development activities result in an average of ten publications each year in peer-reviewed journals and numerous presentations at national and international conferences.

Finally, the activity of the RCMO team has a very strong collaborative component as illustrated by the projects and scientific publications, either internally with the ILM, MOSAIC, CLARTE and CONCEPT teams or externally with academic partners such as the Laboratoire Hubert Curien, the Institut des Nanosciences de Lyon, the CRHEA, the LAAS, the Phlam, the CINaM, the University of Stuttgart, the Australian National University... The RCMO team is also very attached to industrial partnerships through a common laboratory (LabTOP) with the company CILAS and an active and fruitful collaboration with the company Bühler/Leybold Optics (Alzenau, Germany), the manufacturer of the deposition machines available in the platform. This approach drives the RCMO team on a daily basis and allows the combination of fundamental and applied research.