Annick Loiseau (born 1957) is a French physicist who is a researcher at the

French National Centre for Scientific Research The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CNRS) is the French state research organisation and is the largest fundamental science agency in Europe. In 2016, it employed 31,63 ...

Laboratory of Microstructure Studies and Mechanics of Materials. She was the first woman to be appointed to the Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales (

ONERA The Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales (ONERA) is the French national aerospace research centre. It is a public establishment with industrial and commercial operations, and carries out application-oriented research to supp ...

). Her research considers low-dimensional materials such as

carbon nanotubes A scanning tunneling microscopy image of a single-walled carbon nanotube Rotating single-walled zigzag carbon nanotube A carbon nanotube (CNT) is a tube made of carbon with diameters typically measured in nanometers. ''Single-wall carbon na ...

graphene Graphene () is an allotrope of carbon consisting of a single layer of atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice nanostructure.

, and

boron nitride Boron nitride is a thermally and chemically resistant refractory compound of boron and nitrogen with the chemical formula BN. It exists in various crystalline forms that are isoelectronic to a similarly structured carbon lattice. The hexagonal ...

. In 2006 she was awarded the

CNRS Silver Medal The CNRS Silver Medal is a scientific award given every year to about fifteen researchers by the French National Centre for Scientific Research The French National Centre for Scientific Research (french: link=no, Centre national de la recherch ...

Early life and education

Loiseau studied at

Chimie ParisTech Chimie ParisTech (officially École nationale supérieure de chimie de Paris (''National Chemical Engineering Institute in Paris''), also known as ENSCP or Chimie Paris), founded in 1896 within the University of Paris, is an engineering school ...

. During the end of her studies she completed an internship at the

solid-state physics laboratory. She moved to the

Paris-Sud University Paris-Sud University (French: ''Université Paris-Sud''), also known as University of Paris — XI (or as Université d'Orsay before 1971), was a French research university distributed among several campuses in the southern suburbs of Paris, in ...

for her doctoral studies.

Research and career

Loiseau joined the faculty at the French aerospace laboratory, Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales (ONERA). At ONERA, she worked on high-resolution electron microscopy, which she developed to study metal

alloys An alloy is a mixture of chemical elements of which at least one is a metal. Unlike chemical compounds with metallic bases, an alloy will retain all the properties of a metal in the resulting material, such as electrical conductivity, ductility ...

. In 1992 she became interested in carbon nanotubes, which had recently been discovered by

Sumio Iijima is a Japanese physicist and inventor, often cited as the inventor of carbon nanotubes. Although carbon nanotubes had been observed prior to his "invention", Iijima's 1991 paper generated unprecedented interest in the carbon nanostructures and ...

. She started to work on graphene and carbon-nanotubes, and eventually led the Graphene-Nanotube Research Group. In 1996 Loiseau became the first woman to be appointed research director at ONERA. She has focused on

transmission electron microscopy Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is a microscopy technique in which a beam of electrons is transmitted through a specimen to form an image. The specimen is most often an ultrathin section less than 100 nm thick or a suspension on a g ...

electron energy loss spectroscopy In electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) a material is exposed to a beam of electrons with a known, narrow range of kinetic energies. Some of the electrons will undergo inelastic scattering, which means that they lose energy and have their pa ...

(TEM–EELS). Her current research activities focus on synthesis and study of the structural, optical and electronic properties of

nanomaterials * Nanomaterials describe, in principle, materials of which a single unit is sized (in at least one dimension) between 1 and 100 nm (the usual definition of nanoscale). Nanomaterials research takes a materials science-based approach to na ...

by optical spectroscopy and TEM-EELS Loiseau has been involved in the

Graphene Flagship The Graphene Flagship is a European Union scientific research initiative. With a budget of €1 billion, it is one of the large scale initiatives organized by the Future and Emerging Technologies program, along with the Human Brain Project and th ...

since its start in 2013 and is a current member of its executive board.

Awards and honours

* 1988 Grand Prix Aluminum Pechiney of the Academy of Sciences * 1995 Chimie ParisTech metallurgy medal * 1999 of the

Société Française de Physique The Société Française de Physique (SFP), or the French Physical Society, is the main professional society of French physicists. It was founded in 1873 by Charles Joseph d'Almeida. History The French Physical Society is a state-approved non-p ...

* 2006

* 2011

Legion of Honour The National Order of the Legion of Honour (french: Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur), formerly the Royal Order of the Legion of Honour ('), is the highest French order of merit, both military and civil. Established in 1802 by Napoleon ...

Selected publications

Journal articles

* * *

Books

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Loiseau, Annick 1957 births French physicists Recipients of the Legion of Honour Living people Chimie ParisTech alumni