CEA, Laboratoire Léon Brillouin

Philippe Bourges is a research director at CEA (French Atomic Institute), working at the laboratoire Léon Brillouin, UMR mixte CEA/CNRS, in the Paris-Saclay  university. He was scientific responsible of a neutron spectrometer around the reactor Orphée in Saclay, and is now involved in the building of a novel neutron instrument at the upcoming European Spallation Source (ESS). He mainly focusses his research on magnetic correlations in unconventional superconductors to identify a novel mechanism of superconductivity of high critical temperature in several families of superconducting materials. He discovered a spontaneous magnetic order by diffraction of polarized neutrons which illuminates in an original way the physics of these materials. This order is described by the circulation of microscopic currents at the atomic scale which potentially represents a new state of quantum matter. He was awarded in 2020 by the French Sciences Academy of the CEA “Science and Innovation” prize.