Louis Néel

He got married to Hélène Hourticq in 1931. They were blessed with three children, Marie Françoise, Marguerite and Pierre.

While Marie Françoise became an Attachée d'Administration at the Conseil d'Etat, Pierre became a television producer and Marguerite got married to Guély, Professeur agrégée d'histoire.

Néel passed away on November 17, 2000, at the age of 95 in Brive-la-Gaillarde, a commune of France.

He was born on November 22, 1904, in Lyons-la-Forêt, Eure in Upper Normandy, France, in the family of M. Néel.

He attended the ‘Lycée du Parc’ in Lyon and then joined the ‘École Normale Supérieure’ in Paris in 1924.

After completing his studies at the ‘École Normale Supérieure’ in 1928 he was inducted as a lecturer.

He earned a D.Sc. from the ‘University of Strasbourg’ in 1932 under the guidance of French physicist Pierre-Ernest Weiss who in 1907 developed the domain theory of ferromagnetism. It is under Professor Weiss that he started his research in magnetism in the latter’s lab in Strasbourg.

He focussed his research on molecular level, types of magnetism that vary from the most common form of magnetism, the ferromagnetism, in the early 1930s. In case of ferromagnetism, while at low temperature, the electrons spin in same direction.

Néel discovered that in certain substances the magnetic moments of molecules and atoms line up in a common pattern with neighbouring spins and point in opposite directions thus exhibiting a different magnetic property that came to be known as antiferromagnetism. However such behavior ceases to exist at a certain level of temperature or higher than that. The temperature level is named 'Néel temperature' after him.

His investigations on the fine-grain ferromagnetics contributed in elucidating the exceptional magnetic memory of certain mineral deposits that equipped us with data on alterations in the strength as also direction of the magnetic field of Earth.

In 1937 he was appointed a Professor at the Faculty of Science at the ‘University of Strasbourg’ where he served till 1945.

Meanwhile in 1939 he was called upon for defence service and delegated with the responsibility of protecting the French ships from magnetic mines of Germany. He discovered a new procedure of neutralization to safeguard the ships.

His contributions and discoveries related to magnetic properties aided electronic engineers in developing very small particles that can store data magnetically in the memory core of a computer, which helped enhance the memory units of computer to a great extent.

Such works of Néel made manufacture of ferromagnetic materials of almost any specification possible and that in turn paved the way for developing several new synthetic ferrite materials thereby revolutionizing the world of microwave electronics.