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Erwin-Félix Lewy-Bertaut
Born9 February 1913
Leobschütz (Germany)
Died6 November 2003
Grenoble (France)
NationalityFrench
Known forBertaut-Warren-Averbach law on the granulometry of powders

Magnetic orders and structures of rare earth ferrite garnets

Impulse and strong contribution to the setting up of the European Institut Laue- Langevin
AwardsChevalier de la Légion d’honneur, Commandeur de l’Ordre national du mérite Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universities of Genève, Xanthi Francfort, Uppsala, Helsinki
Scientific career
Doctoral advisorLouis Néel

Erwin-Félix Lewy-Bertaut, born on 9 February 1913 in Leobschütz (Poland, then Germany) and died on 6 November 2003 in Grenoble, France, was a French scientist renowned internationally for his work in the fields of neutron scattering and crystallography.

Born as Erwin Lewy in Silesia (then in Germany), he received a training as a lawyer. As his family was Jewish, when the Nazis came to power he left Germany for France, becoming a French citizen in 1936 and starting a scientific career as a chemical engineer. At the start of the Second World War, he joined the French army and, following the defeat of 1940, his military commander gave him the papers of a deceased soldier and a new identity: Félix Bertaut. His family, whom he had brought to Bordeaux, were arrested and disappeared into the camps in Germany. He then went to Paris and Grenoble to work with Louis Néel, where he learned about solid state chemistry and X-ray diffraction and became a crystallographer and a physicist of magnetism. He also became a pioneer in neutron diffraction and, with Louis Néel, played a leading role in the creation of the European research institute ILL (Institut Laue-Langevin). He was a man of great culture and the impact of his scientific studies meant that he held positions of responsibility in the main international crystallography and physics organisations. He was a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

From Erwin Lewy to Félix Bertaut (1913 - 1946)

Erwin Lewy grew up in a traditional Jewish family. In 1930, his mother died and the whole family moved to Gleiwitz in an atmosphere of economic crisis and the rise of Nazism. In 1931, Erwin Lewy studied law in Freiburg and then in Breslau (now Wrocław). He was twenty when Hitler came to power in Germany, where a "numerus clausus" virtually banned Jews from attending university. Lewy was attacked by a Hitler youth group. This atmosphere of violence and the reading of Mein Kampf made him aware of the seriousness of the situation. Deeply francophile, he decided to emigrate to Paris in France. In the end, however, he went to Bordeaux, where he was awarded a scholarship from the Rothschild Foundation and enrolled at university. There he obtained a degree in chemical engineering as well as a degree in physics and mathematics. The future Nobel Prize winner Alfred Kastler was one of his teachers. To supplement his income, he gave lessons in mathematics and German, and had as a pupil the future academician Jean-Claude Pecker.

Erwin Lewy obtained French nationality in 1936 and in February 1939, aware of the danger of Nazism, he brought his family to live with him in Talence near Bordeaux. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, he interrupted his initial doctoral work on rosin to enlist as a volunteer in the French army. When the war broke out in 1940, Colonel Faure gave him the military record book of a missing soldier, Félix Bertaut. This was to be his only identity document for a long time and, faithful to this unknown Frenchman who enabled him to conceal his identity, he kept this name for good. He was hired as a chemical engineer in the unoccupied zone in Barbaste, where he worked on improving the strength of bicycle brakes made from agglomerated cork, which was important because bicycles were almost the only means of transport available at the time. The French police in the free zone were under orders from Vichy, and Félix Bertaut was unable to prevent the Nazis from kidnapping his family and his rabbi father in Bordeaux, who disappeared into the concentration camps; he would only learn in 1978 that they had been deported to Auschwitz, via Drancy.

To avoid police checks and escape the Obligatory Labour Service, he was forced to go to Paris, where Alfred Kastler suggested he join Marcel Mathieu at the Laboratoire Central des Poudres (L.C.P.). He then worked with Emmanuel Grison - the future director of the Centre Atomique de Saclay - who taught him how to use the Tables Internationales pour la Détermination des Structures (International Tables for the Determination of Structures). This was his first contact with crystallography. However, following an unfortunate police check on the registration number of his bicycle, he was summoned to the Paris Prefecture. Following Marcel Mathieu's recommendations, the next day he took the train with a mission order signed by the director of the L.C.P. to Grenoble, then in the Italian-occupied zone, to visit the future Nobel Prize winner Louis Néel, who was also temporarily withdrawn from the University of Strasbourg. Louis Néel was continuing his work on magnetism, begun in Pierre Weiss's laboratory. His team of researchers (most of whom had emigrated from occupied France) included Jacques Mehring, who had also come from the L.C.P., Robert Forrer, Noël Felici and Louis Weil. Félix Bertaut's knowledge of crystallography proved invaluable to the group, who worked in the Institut Fourier at Grenoble's Faculty of Science, where he and Jacques Mehring built a rudimentary X-ray machine.

After the war, it was with the help of this team that Louis Néel founded the Laboratoire d'Electrostatique et de Physique du Métal (L.E.P.M.) in 1946, which was the first CNRS laboratory outside the Paris region. It included electrostatics under N. Felici, very low temperatures under L. Weil, magnetism under L. Néel and X-ray diffraction under E. F. Bertaut. Félix Bertaut, who had arrived in 1943 before the Liberation "without any qualifications", took over Erwin Lewy's qualifications in 1946 and obtained a research grant from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) under his wartime identity, "Félix Bertaut".

Félix Bertaut and crystallography (1946-2003)

In 1946, Félix Bertaut chose a new subject for his doctoral thesis: "X-ray studies of the dimensions of Bragg domains in polycrystalline powders. - Application to the study of the texture and structure of pyrophoric iron powders and their magnetic properties". In this thesis work, he first distinguished between the size of the grains themselves and their distribution. This knowledge of the grain size of iron powders was necessary for Louis Néel's magnetism studies, as Louis Weil had just succeeded in synthesising iron powders with small particles that are good materials for permanent magnets. Part of this thesis had an industrial outlet because these excellent iron-based magnets, produced by the local industry UGINE using waste from the buttons of the company ARaymond, were used in particular in bicycle dynamos.

Félix Bertaut submitted his thesis in 1949, with the great crystallographer André Guinier as examiner. At the time, this work was a highly original application of X-ray diffraction, and this type of X-ray diffraction studies of powder granulometry has since developed considerably, but the method established by Bertaut and at the same time by Warren and Averbach , known as the Bertaut-Warren-Averbach method, remains a classic and a cornerstone of this discipline.

Immediately after his thesis, Félix Bertaut developed the group at the L.E.P.M. that formed the basis of the X-ray department to carry out research in cristallography, a science that enables the atomic arrangements in solids to be determined using X-ray diffraction, with the aim of establishing the relationship between crystalline structure and magnetic properties. Next, Félix Bertaut and his group, along with Francis Forrat and Professor René Pauthenet, distinguished themselves with their work on garnet ferrites, from which the theory of antiferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism was built up. These garnets were the symbol of the joint work of L. Néel, F. Bertaut and R. Pauthenet: this is why E.F. Lewy-Bertaut had them engraved on his sword as an Academician. These ferrites are currently important materials for magnetic recording and microwave electronics (such as mobile phones).

E.F. Bertaut was involved in several other aspects of crystallography. He solved the structure of complex compounds such as the non-stoichiometric pyrrhotite, Fe1-xS. He developed what is known as structure factor algebra. He made an enormous contribution to neutron crystallography. He extended the use of group theory in crystallography, particularly for magnetic structures. When the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) decided to finalise the volume on the symmetry of space groups in the International Tables of Crystallography, he was a member of the ad hoc committee and contributed in particular to the definition of magnetic groups. He used the symmetry of crystals to propose all possible magnetic structures. This "Bertaut method" was very useful for complex structures, and even more so before the availability of computers. Of course, his students had to apply this method anyway. At the same time, he did not forget his training as a chemist and, in 'his' two laboratories, chemical syntheses of new materials continually fed into crystallographic studies, mainly for a better understanding of magnetism. One of his merits is that he was able to maintain close contact between theory and experimental applications.

In 1971 (just after Louis Néel was awarded the Nobel Prize for his studies of antiferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism and their applications), the L.E.P.M. laboratory moved next to the new Centre d'Etude Nucléaire de Grenoble (C.E.N.G.), also created by L. Néel, on the former "Polygone" military site, giving rise to a group of C. N.R.S. laboratories. E.F. Bertaut, who was appointed Maître de Recherche and then Directeur de Recherches at the CNRS, was its director from 1971 to 1982, until he took an "active retirement", where he continued his research work, as a referee for scientific journals on crystallography and as an Academician.

In 2007, along with the Centre de Recherche sur les Très Basses Températures (CRTBT), the Laboratoire de Magnétisme and the Laboratoire d'Etudes des propriétés Electroniques (LEPES), this crystallography laboratory will be one of the building blocks of the Institut Néel at the C.N.R.S. - U.G.A.

Erwin Félix Bertaut and neutrons

In 1949, Félix Bertaut's research was turned upside down by a one-page publication in "Physical Review" by two Americans, Shull (later to win a Nobel Prize for this study) and Smart, which revealed the first magnetic structure obtained by neutron diffraction in manganese oxide MnO. The hypotheses formulated 15 years earlier by Louis Néel on antiferromagnetism were verified: magnetic orders could be observed in "neutron diffraction images". Louis Néel was enthusiastic and planned to build a neutron reactor in Grenoble. To this end, Félix Bertaut travelled to the United States in 1951, and then (after lengthy procedures due to McCarthyism) received a Fulbright grant in 1953 to continue his research in the United States for a year, where he joined Ray Pepinski's laboratory at State College in Pennsylvania. Pepinski gave him access to the Brookhaven atomic centre, where he visited the neutron diffraction facilities of Lester Corliss and Julius Hastings and learned about neutron techniques.

For some time, France and General De Gaulle had been in favour of setting up a nuclear research centre, and in 1955 Louis Néel, a reserve admiral who had the confidence of the French Army, provided decisive arguments (scientific themes and techniques) for the establishment of a Centre d'Etudes Nucléaires à Grenoble (C.E.N.G.) on the "Polygone" site. L. Néel bought the military land at the Polygone d'Artillerie for a symbolic 1 franc to create the Nuclear Research Centre, which he would direct. He asked E.F. Bertaut to set up a Neutron Diffraction Laboratory dedicated to crystallographic studies using neutron beams. E.F. Bertaut was in charge from 1958 to 1976, and from 1958 W. Koehler and L. Corliss joined him to introduce Grenoble researchers to neutron diffraction and design the first diffractometer. This and the next were installed at the Mélusine reactor (8 MW), followed by two others at the Siloe reactor (35 MW). This laboratory was the crucible for a generation of scientists familiar with neutrons, who would also work with the Centre de Saclay. It was also at this time that E.F. Bertaut, F. Forrat, P. Blum and R. Pauthenet made their mark with the discovery and study of garnet ferrites6-7, now essential materials for magnetic memories and high-frequency electronics. E.F. Bertaut and his laboratories gained international renown in crystallography, neutron diffraction and magnetism.

The international reputation of the Grenoble laboratories and E.F. Bertaut in crystallography, neutron diffraction and magnetism led to the first international conference on neutron scattering being held in Grenoble in 1963. It was during the banquet at this conference that the construction of a European high-flux neutron reactor was first suggested by Néel in a speech prepared by E.F. Bertaut.

Then, with the support of L. Néel, E.F. Bertaut promoted the project and convinced his German collaborators. He was certainly convincing - and it was the right idea at the right time, since the French and German peoples, under the leadership of De Gaulle and Adenauer, were at that time re-establishing friendly relations. So on 22 January 1963, the "Elysée Treaty" signed by Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the President of the French Republic, Charles de Gaulle, launched Franco-German cooperation. E. F. Bertaut was deeply pleased with this Franco-German collaboration and worked relentlessly to forge closer links with German crystallographers and chemists. He will be one of the ambassadors of the High Flux Reactor project, giving it scientific applications and a Franco-German support community. The success of neutron techniques enabled L. Néel and E. F. Bertaut to propose and obtain the construction of the Franco-German High Flux Reactor (ILL) in Grenoble in 1967.

This led to the creation of the high-flux neutron reactor. Grenoble was considered a major centre for magnetism under L. Néel and a capital of neutron diffraction under F. Bertaut, so the institute was built in Grenoble. Its name "Institut Laue-Langevin" (ILL) expresses the combination of crystallography and magnetism. Initially Franco-German, the ILL became European and was a key partner in the construction of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble. This source of synchrotron radiation is used in a variety of fields including biology, medicine, chemistry, magnetism, high pressure, materials science via crystallography (and among its many applications) magnetic nanostructures, etc.

The ILL has now taken over from Grenoble's first reactors, and Bertaut's students (or his students' students) continue to develop this knowledge. The seeds sown by Néel, Bertaut and their colleagues have germinated and grown.

Research

E. F. Bertaut was an eclectic, highly cultured man who had learned Latin, Greek, French, English, law, music and then chemistry and crystallography and, as Professor André Guinier said, "Félix Bertaut is a mathematician who does crystallography". The author of several hundred publications, of which a hundred or so were by his sole name, often short notes in the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des sciences or in Acta Crystallographica, and the head of two quite different laboratories, E.F. Bertaut was also an ardent apostle of the province and of diversity. He played a major role in turning a provincial town, Grenoble, into a European scientific centre.

Scientific distinctions and appointments

E.F. Bertaut's scientific reputation is international. He was a member of the IUCr executive committee between 1975 and 1981. He was co-founder of its "Neutron Diffraction" commission and co-founder and chairman of its "International Tables" and "Charge, Spin and Momentum Density" commissions. He was the IUCr representative on the Solid State Commission of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) between 1966 and 1972 and was secretary and then chairman of the Solid State Physics Section. He was editor or co-editor of numerous scientific journals. From 1958 to 1982, he was scientific advisor to various institutes: Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA), CNRS, ILL, and Max Planck Institut - Stuttgart). Knight of the Legion of Honour and Commander of the National Order of Merit, he has received several awards and has been appointed Professor honoris causa of various universities: Geneva, Frankfurt, Uppsala, Helsinki and Xanthi. He was elected a full member of the Académie des Sciences in 1979.

More information

Bibliography

References

  1. Alfred Kastler, Nobel laureate for physics in 1994 “for the discovery and development of optical methods for studying hertzian resonances in atoms”.
  2. Louis Néel, Nobel laureate for physics in 1970 “for fundamental work and discoveries concerning antiferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism which have led to important applications in solid state physics”.
  7. Bertaut, E. F. (1953). "Contribution à l'étude des structures lacunaires: La pyrrhotine". Acta Crystallographica. 6 (6): 557–561. doi:10.1107/S0365110X53001502.
  9. Bertaut, E. F. (1968). "Representation analysis of magnetic structures". Acta Crystallographica Section A: Crystal Physics, Diffraction, Theoretical and General Crystallography. 24 (1): 217–231. Bibcode:1968AcCrA..24..217B. doi:10.1107/S0567739468000306.
  10. Bertaut, E. F.; Wondratschek, H. (1971). "Ordering scheme for general positions in International Tables". Acta Crystallographica Section A. 27 (3): 298–300. Bibcode:1971AcCrA..27..298B. doi:10.1107/S056773947100069X.
  11. Shull, C. G.; Smart, J. Samuel (1949). "Detection of Antiferromagnetism by Neutron Diffraction". Physical Review. 76 (8): 1256–1257. Bibcode:1949PhRv...76.1256S. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.76.1256.2.
  12. B.N. Brockhouse & C.G. Shull, Nobel laureate for physics in 1994 "for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter" to B.N. Brockhouse "for the development of neutron spectroscopy" and to C.G. Shull "for the development of the neutron diffraction"
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