CPOM Staff based at UCL
Michel Tsamados
| email: mct |
tel: 0207.679.7871 |
| fax: 0207.679.7883 |
Michel Tsamados was appointed as a research associate in the UCL Department of Earth Sciences in January 2010.
Michel has a BSc. in Theoretical Physics (statistical and non-linear physics) from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and a Ph.D. on the mechanical properties and statistical physics of disordered glassy systems awarded in 2009 from Université Claude Bernard Lyon and in collaboration with King's College London. He is also holder of the 'agrégation' in physics, the highest teaching diploma in France.
He has been concerned during his PhD with the physical properties of glassy materials, which include many different systems ranging from metallic glasses or polymer glasses to complex fluids, or even athermal systems such as foams and grains. The term glassy relates to the relaxation times of these materials that are very large with respect to the experimental scale of study. The physical properties of these topologically disordered amorphous materials are markedly different from those of their ordered crystalline counterparts. The understanding of these phenomena is a notoriously complex problem. This complexity is reflected in anomalies that appear in the intimately linked thermal (anomalous heat capacity) and mechanical (anomalous vibrational states) properties of glasses.
Lacking the dislocations and grain boundaries inherent in crystalline materials, glasses exhibit physical properties representative of a completely new paradigm in materials science. Realising that the mechanical properties and the rheology of a wide class of amorphous glassy materials involve - in contrast to dislocations in crystals - localized structural rearrangements, he has intended in his research to identify, characterize and use these elementary dynamical units as building blocks of the macroscopical mechanical response and rheology of glasses.
His project at CPOM consists in applying his knowledge of the rheology of complex systems to the understanding of the flow of sea ice. Indeed studies show that the observed discrepancy between sea ice model predictions and observations is at least partly due to limitations in the existing model physics. In particular, the models are highly sensitive to uncertain parameters describing sea ice rheology, i.e. the relationship between sea ice deformation and the stresses required to cause that deformation. Researchers (Wilchinsky, Feltham) at CPOM have studied the role that leads (linear regions of weaker ice or open water) play in determining sea ice stress and deformation. Previous sea ice climate models have not explicitly treated leads and have implicitly assumed they are isotropically distributed. Based on recent models developed at CPOM of sea ice deformation and rheology that take account of the observed anisotropy of the sea ice cover, the purpose of this project will be to utilize high resolution SAR deformation products to calibrate and, where necessary, extend the simplest model of sea ice anisotropy. Also it is the aim of this project to include this model of sea ice anisotropy into the sea ice component of a GCM.
Please click here for a list of Michel's publications.