Highlights of my work #

My areas of expertise are in statistical mechanics and theoretical condensed matter physics. My most prominent research is on phase transitions and critical phenomena at surfaces and interfaces. Many of my contributions are in the domain of “wetting” phenomena. My key achievements include:
1) real-space renormalisation group calculations using mean-field approximations, in collaboration with Attilio Stella;
2) wetting phase transitions and critical phenomena in spin models, with Peter Nightingale, and in liquid mixtures, with experimentalist Daniel Bonn;
3) re-entrant nematic and smectic phase transitions in polar liquid crystals, with Nihat Berker;
4) following the pioneering work of Ben Widom in the early 1990s, he became the leading expert on the theory of the line tension at a wetting phase transition. He unravelled the limiting value of the line tension as well as its singular behavior, at wetting, and showed how both depend crucially on the order of the wetting transition and on the range of the intermolecular forces. The “Indekeu-Robledo conjecture” is a key result in this context;
5) the prediction of an interface delocalisation (or “wetting”-like) phase transition in type-I superconductors, with Hans van Leeuwen, and its experimental confirmation at KU Leuven, with Vladimir Kozhevnikov;
6) the “Hierarchical Deposition Model” and its solution in terms of logarithmic fractals;
7) the prediction of wetting phase transitions in mixtures of Bose-Einstein condensates, with Bert Van Schaeybroeck;
8) the Special-Attention Network, and the connection between interactions and topology in critical phenomena on scale-free networks, with Carlo Vanderzande;
9) the “Beyond-Linear-Use-of-Equation-Superposition” (BLUES) method for solving nonlinear differential equations, with Kristian Müller-Nedebock and Jonas Berx;
10) the exact wetting phase diagram of the “Koga-Widom-Indekeu model” for fluid three-phase equilibria near a tricritical point.