Concept
Quasicrystal
Related people (24)
Michel Rappaz
After a PhD in solid state physics (1978) at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and a post-doc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Michel Rappaz joined the Institute of Materials of EPFL in 1981. After two years in an engineering company, he came back to EPFL in 1984 where he was nominated Adjunct Professor in 1990 and Full Professor in 2003. He retired from EPFL in 2015 and is now Emeritus Professor and independent consultant for several industries and research centres.
His main interests are in phase transformations and solidification, in particular the coupling of macroscopic aspects of heat and mass transfer with microscopic aspects of microstructure and defect formation. Among his diverse achievements, one can mention in particular the development of cellular automata for grain structure predictions and of granular models for hot tearing formation in castings, the coupling of Finite Element method with microscopic models of nucleation and growth, the application of the phase field method to the understanding of various microstructures, the discovery of quasicrystal mediated-nucleation in alloys, and many other studies both fundamental at the microstructure-defect level and more applied at the level of processes.
Some of the software developments have been commercialized by a spin-off company founded by his group in 1991 (Calcom SA), now part of the French company ESI. Michel Rappaz initiated in 1992 an annual postgraduate course on solidification which has been attended by more than 900 participants from all over the world. He is presently collaborating closely with another spin-off company started from his group, Novamet SàrL.
Michel Rappaz has received several awards, in particular the Mathewson co-author award (1994) and author award (1997) of the American Mineral, Metals and Materials Society (TMS), the Koerber foundation award jointly with Profs Y. Bréchet and M. Asbby (1996), the Sainte-Claire Deville Medal (1996) and the Grand Medal (2011) from the French Materials Society, the Bruce Chalmers Award of TMS (2002), the Mc Donald Memorial Lecture award of Canada (2005), the FEMS European Materials Gold Medal (2013) and the Brimacombe Prize of TMS (2015). He is a highly-cited author of ISI, a fellow of ASM, IOP and TMS, and has co-authored more than 200 publications and two books.
Gervais Chapuis
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Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), Switzerland. After graduating in crystallography in 1966, he prepared his PhD thesis in the same institution under the direction of Prof.. A. Niggli which he obtained in 1972. For three years he continued his research at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California in the laboratory of Prof. D. H. Templeton, a well-known specialist in the field of resonant scattering. Back in Switzerland, he joined the newly created Institute of Crystallography at the University of Lausanne under the direction of Prof.. D. Schwarzenbach. In 1991 he was appointed full professor and in 1999, director of the Institute of crystallography. In 2003, his unit was transferred to the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne (EPFL) where he was appointed professor.
G. Chapuis has chaired numerous committees in national and international organisations in the field of crystallography. In particular, he chaired the committee of aperiodic structures of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). He is also a member of the Education Committee of that organization. He also chaired the Swiss Society of Crystallography.
G. Chapuis is co-editor of the Journal Acta Crystallographica and participates in many committees for various readings of academic journals devoted to crystallography and solid state physics.
His research areas cover more specifically the theoretical and experimental study of aperiodic structures, especially incommensurate structures by diffraction and molecular dynamics. He is the author of over two hundred scientific papers published in international peer-reviewed journals. Moreover G. Chapuis is dedicated to the development of interactive teaching in crystallography using new communication technologies available on the Internet.
Alfredo Pasquarello
Alfredo Pasquarello studied physics at the
Scuola Normale Superiore
of Pisa and at the University of Pisa, obtaining their respective degrees in 1986. He obtained a doctoral degree at the EPFL in 1991 with a thesis on
Multiphoton Transitions in Solids
. Then, he moved to Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill (New Jersey), where he carried out postdoctoral research on the magnetic properties of carbon fullerenes. In 1993, he joined the Institute for Numerical Research in the Physics of Materials (IRRMA), where his activity involved first-principles simulation methods. In 1998, he was awarded the EPFL Latsis Prize for his research work on disordered silica materials. Succeeding in grant programs of the Swiss National Science Foundation, he then set up his own research group at IRRMA. In July 2003, he is appointed Professor in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics at EPFL. Currently, he leads the Chair of Atomic Scale Simulation.
Marco Grioni
Marco Grioni was born in Milan (Italy) where he graduated in 1982. He has occupied research positions at Minneapolis (USA), Nijmegen (The Netherlands), Orsay (France) and Neuchâtel, where he became Privat Docent in Solid State Physics in 1994. Since 1996 he is at EPFL, where he teaches physics to undergraduate and graduate students. He is acting director of the Laboratory of Electron Spectroscopy of IPN, and an adjunct professor from 2005.
His research interests concern the electronic properties of novel materials,namely high-temperature superconductors, low-dimensional metals, and heavy fermion compounds, which he investigates by high-resolution photoemission (ARPES), ultrafast time-resolved ARPES, and photon-in photon-out synchrotron-based spectroscopies. Author of approx. 220 scientific articles, he is actively involved in the development of new instruments. From 2003 to 2006 he was the chairman of the users organization of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF Grenoble). Between 2010 and 2017 he served as chairman of the scientific advisory committee of the french national synchrotron light source SOLEIL
Giorgio Margaritondo
Citizen of the USA and Switzerland, Giorgio Margaritondo was born in Rome, Italy, in 1946. He received the Laurea summa cum laude from the University of Rome in 1969. From 1969 he was an employee of the Italian National Research Council in Rome and Frascati and, in 1975-77, he was at Bell Laboratories in the USA. From 1978 to 1990, he was professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA; in 1984 he was nominated associate director for research of the Synchrotron Radiation Center of the same university. In 1990 he was nominated "professeur ordinaire" (full professor) at the EPFL; he directed the Institute of Applied Physics and the Physics Department. He was also a honorary faculty member at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. In 2001 he became Dean of the EPFL Faculty of Basic Sciences. In 2004 he was nominated Provost and he served until 2010, when he became Dean of Continuing Education, until his retirement from the EPFL in 2016 In addition to teaching general physics, his activity concerns the physics of semiconductors and superconductors (electronic states, surfaces and interfaces) and of biological systems; his main experimental techniques are electron spectroscopy and spectromicroscopy, x-ray imaging and scanning near-field microscopy, including experiments with synchrotron light and with free electron lasers. Author of more than 700 scientific publications and 9 books, he was also coordinator in 1995-98 of the scientific division of the Elettra synchrotron in Trieste. In 1997-2003 he was coordinator of the European Commission Round Table on synchrotron radiation, and then became president of the Council of the European Commission Integrated Initiative on Synchrotron and Free Electron Laser Science (IA-SFS and then ELISA), the largest network in the world in this domain. In 2011-15, he was Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Physics D (Applied Physics). He is currently vice-president of the council of the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI), and president of the Scientific and Technological Committee of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). He is Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Vacuum Society and Fellow and Chartered Physicist of the Institute of Physics.