Nobel Prize-winning physicist Pierre-Gilles de Gennes will speak on "Novel Schemes for Artificial Muscle" when he delivers a Gemant Lecture on Monday, May 5, at 3:30 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium, Rockefeller Hall, at Cornell. The lecture, which is sponsored by the Department of Physics, is free and open to the public.

The director of the College of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris and professor of solid state physics at the University of Paris, de Gennes is best known for his studies of liquid crystals and polymers, an achievement for which he was honored with the 1991 Nobel Prize for physics.

The speaker has visited Cornell before as a professor-at-large and as a Bethe Lecturer. Some of his special insights into the fractal nature of matter, as caused by thermal fluctuations, build on the work of Cornell chemists and physicists Benjamin Widom, Michael E. Fisher and Kenneth Wilson. And de Gennes found that much earlier work by Cornell chemist Paul Flory could be combined with new ideas about the fluctuations in the shape of polymers to reveal how polymer solutions unified collective and individual molecular properties.

More recently, de Gennes' interest in "soft" condensed matter has extended to interfacial phenomena such as wetting of surfaces by liquids, the mechanisms by which materials stick to each other, and the soft materials of living matter.

The lecture is part of the Gemant Lecture Series at Cornell, named for physicist Andrew Gemant (1895-1983). When the 1995 Andrew Gemant Award was given by the American Institute of Physics to Robert R. Wilson, Cornell professor emeritus of physics, the lectureship also was established here to provide for a series of presentations of interest to the public as well as to the local community of physicists.