Scientific program > Gabriel Faivre memorial session

Eutectics session in honor of Gabriel Faivre

Organizers: Silvère Akamatsu, Sabine Bottin-Rousseau

Sorbonne Université, Institut des Nanosciences de Paris, Paris, France

During these sessions of the ICASP-6 conference, in memory and honor of Gabriel Faivre (1944-2020), scientists belonging to different generations of collaborators, colleagues, and students of his are invited to present their recent research on eutectic and peritectic growth. Their testimony will be invaluable in bringing to light a vast heritage of prospective topics in the science of solidification and crystal growth, and Gabriel Faivre’s fundamental contribution to it. 

From the end of the 1980s, Gabriel Faivre undertook a systematic research in solidification guided by the new concepts of the nonlinear physics of out-of-equilibrium pattern forming systems. With his coworkers in Paris, he refined the method of in situ directional solidification of model alloys, focussing in particular on the dynamics of eutectic growth patterns. Full light has been thus shed onto new phenomena, fascinating to the eye and the mind. In particular, during the last decade, Gabriel Faivre mentored an in-depth analysis of interfacial-anisotropy effects on coupled-growth patterns, which led to extending the theory of regular eutectics to crystal orientation effects during eutectic grain growth. Constantly keen to associate experimentation and theory, Gabriel Faivre was one of the first to promote, thanks to fruitful collaborations, the combined use, and the direct comparison of in situ experiments and numerical simulations.

Through his published papers, his work as a scientific advisor with students and post-doc researchers at INSP (Sorbonne Université – CNRS), and his collaborations with physicists and materials scientists in France and abroad, his influence has spread over the solidification community. Sharing his profound knowledge of the fine arts and humanities, Gabriel Faivre also instilled the best of intellectual thinking in those who were fortunate enough to work and interact with him.