Eric Collet - Biography#
Professor Eric Collet is Exceptional Class Professor and Senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France and is worldwide known for his achievements in the field of ultrafast photo-induced phase transitions. He was trained at Rennes 1 University, “Physics of condensed matter” specialty (1996). His PhD thesis in Physics "Condensation and ordering of charge-transfer excitations at the neutral-ionic transition", was supervised by Prof. H. Cailleau. Followed a post-doctoral fellowship in Saclay’s neutron centre (1999-2001) and an invitation to the Tokyo Institute of Technology (2001), where he investigated electronic phase transitions at equilibrium.
He joined Rennes 1 University as Associate Professor (2001-2007) to develop a new field of photo-induced phase transitions, which quickly resulted in a Science paper (2003), an “Habilitation” to supervise research (2005), a full professor position at Rennes 1 (2007) and Junior membership at Institut Universitaire de France (2008-2013).
He developed research projects using femtosecond spectroscopy and photo-crystallography (in-house and at synchrotrons and X-ray Free Electron Lasers), providing exceptional advances in knowledge. He unravelled ultrafast and coupled changes of electronic and structural dynamics during light-induced spin state trapping or charge-transfer. A review on time-resolved X-ray, with M. Chergui (Chem. Rev. 2017) demonstrates his expertise in ultrafast science.
More recently, he discovered cooperative and elastically-driven photo-induced phase transitions and studied how changes of symmetry and electronic state couple at, or out-of-, equilibrium.
His lectures are related to materials' science, statistical physics and crystallography. He is very active in popularisation of science (science festivals, paper about the physics of Badminton). He was deputy Scientific Director of the Institut de Physique de Rennes (170 staff) (2017-22), and he is now leading the Materials & Light department. He is directing, with S. Ohkoshi, the France-Japan International Research Laboratory DYNACOM.
