He was one of the founders of the Laboratoire de Physique Statistique, École Normale Supérieure, Paris.
He was a lecturer in physics at the École Polytechnique for two years (1982–1984), then a scientific expert with the Direction générale de l'armement until January 2007.
Yves Pomeau combines a deep understanding of physical phenomena with varied and elegant mathematical descriptions.
"[7][8] In his thesis[9][10] he showed that in a dense fluid the interactions are different from what they are at equilibrium and propagate through hydrodynamic modes, which leads to the divergence of transport coefficients in 2 spatial dimensions.
[16] He was a pioneer of lattice Boltzmann methods and played a historical role in the timeline of computational physics.
The consequence is that this transition belongs to the class of directed percolation phenomena in statistical physics, which has also been amply confirmed by experimental and numerical studies.
In collaboration with his former PhD student Basile Audoly and Henri Berestycki, he studied the speed of the propagation of a reaction front in a fast steady flow with a given structure in space.
[23] With Basile Audoly and Martine Ben Amar, Pomeau developed[24] a theory of large deformations of elastic plates which led them to introduce the concept of "d-cone", that is, a geometrical cone preserving the overall developability of the surface, an idea now taken up by the solid mechanics community.
The theory of superconductivity is based on the idea of the formation of pairs of electrons that become more or less bosons undergoing Bose-Einstein condensation.
At this temperature the gas gets a macroscopic component in the quantum ground state, as had been predicted by Einstein long ago.
Pomeau and collaborators showed [26] that the solution of the kinetic equation becomes singular at zero energies and we did also find how the density of the condensate grows with time after the transition.
They also derived the kinetic equation for the Bogoliubov excitations of Bose-Einstein condensates,[27] where they found three collisional processes.
[30] From his more recent work we must distinguish those concerning a phenomenon typically out of equilibrium, that of the emission of photons by an atom maintained in an excited state by an intense field that creates Rabi oscillations.
With Martine Le Berre and Jean Ginibre they showed[31] that the good theory was that of a Kolmogorov equation based on the existence of a small parameter, the ratio of the photon emission rate to the atomic frequency itself.