Four pioneers: Jany Thibault-Pénisson–Pierre Delavignette–Claude Goux–Jacques Lévy

Abstract

In memory of four pioneers in the field of grain boundaries (GBs) and Interfaces, who recently expired: Jany Thibault-Penisson († 2011), Pierre Delavignette († 2011), Claude Goux († 2012) and Jacques Levy († 2012), I recall some of their major achievements. Jany Thibault-Penisson was a pioneer in the use of High Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy. She studied dislocations in Germanium with Alain Bourret in Grenoble, then GBs in Ge and Si, their structures and their interactions with extrinsic dislocations under plastic deformation, and finally interfaces in metallic multilayers. Pierre Delavignette also was a marvellous electron microscopist who worked on dislocations in non-metallic multilayered structures with Severin Amelinckx in Mol (Belgium), and on GBs in hexagonal metals, for which he contributed to the extension of Ranganathan’s approach, together with George Bleris, Theodoros Karakostas, Gerard Nouet, Serge Hagege and others, in parallel with Hans Grimmer, David Warrington, Walter Bollmann, and Roland Bonnet. Claude Goux developed a school of processing, observation, and atomistic simulation of GBs in very pure metals, bringing to the Ecole des Mines of Saint-Etienne what he had learnt in Vitry under Georges Chaudron in the late 1950s. He also had a strong taste for modelling, and his impulse culminated with the 1975 Conference on GBs in Metals held in Saint-Etienne. Jacques Levy has been one of Goux’s first Ph.D. students. They probably made the first electron microscopic observations of high-angle GBs around 1966. Jacques Levy rapidly exerted to assume important positions and became, for instance, the Director of the Ecole des Mines of Paris. Despite all his responsibilities, he still attended IIB conferences many times.