The Meandering Life of a Research Trajectory: Rare Earths in the Aubervilliers Research Centre (1953–2020)

Abstract

Solvay's Centre de Recherches in Aubervilliers (CRA), north of Paris, has been one of the leading institutions in rare earths research in the world for the last sixty years. In the 1960s and 1970s, its pioneering studies in liquid–liquid separation of rare earths made it possible to obtain a new level of purity of final products, opening the door to a vast number of applications in fields as varied as phosphors (for colour TV sets and trichromatic lamps) or catalysis (for exhaust emission control). Generations of researchers, many of whom were educated by the leading French figures in solid-state chemistry, worked behind the centre's walls creating a unique critical mass of rare earths in the French industrial chemical community. Today, the place of rare earths has dwindled in the centre's overall structure, but the trajectory still lingers on. This paper follows the complex life of the rare earths research trajectory in the CRA and tries to understand the factors that contributed to its evolution.