| SISAM 2022: a Brief Introduction to the Symposium in the Honour of Prof. Uichiro Mizutani Jean-marie Dubois1; 1INSTITUT JEAN LAMOUR, Nancy, France; PAPER: 461/SISAM/Regular (Oral) SCHEDULED: 11:30/Mon. 28 Nov. 2022/Ballroom A ABSTRACT: We shall be happy to convene in Phuket on the occasion of the 2022 Sustainable Industrial Processes Summit to celebrate the lifetime achievements of Prof. Dr Uichiro Mizutani from University of Nagoya, Japan. Uichiro received his higher education in this university and then moved to the United States for a post-doc under the supervision of Prof. Massalski at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburg. When back to Japan, he returned to Nagoya where he took a position first as a research fellow and then as an associate professor. This took him to become a full professor and head of a laboratory for the rest of his career until he retired from public education in Japan. He then became a fellow of the famous Toyota Physical and Chemical Research Institute where he still serves as a senior fellow. The career of Uichiro Mizutani is a magnificent example of a full dedication to one key topic in solid-state physics, i.e. the understanding of the behaviour of electrons in metals [1]. This behaviour explains the stability of solid and liquid metals, and provides definite clues to understand why Nature selects specific atomic architectures among the infinite number of possible configurations. It was a matter of interest already before the invention of quantum mechanics in the early 2Oth century, but became a central aspect of solid-state physics when the principles of quantum mechanics were applied to this subject by Fermi, Born, and many others. The invention of quantum mechanical computing techniques made it fully operational in more recent years. Mizutani and his collaborators pioneered the application of this approach to a huge variety of metallic crystals, including complex ones like quasicrystals, their periodic counterparts, and amorphous systems, thus rising a unique body of knowledge and understanding of those systems [2]. Of special relevance is their complete description of the so-called Hume-Rothery rules that explain the formation and stability of many complex crystals and which before them was more a matter of experimental discovery rather than a deeper theoretical insight. Quite a few more fields have benefitted from Mizutani’s work, such as e.g. metallic glasses, or thermoelectric, or superconducting materials. In the end, Mizutani is to be considered as the living key figure in the field of metals and alloys, to be compared with his very few predecessors who like him where honoured by the Hume-Rothery award of the TMS in preceding decades (e.g. Jacques Friedel in France or Sir Nevill Mott in the U.K.). A summary of the many prizes and awards, which were presented to Prof. Mizutani over the years can be found on the SIPS 2022 website [3]. The symposium that is dedicated to honour the achievements of Uichiro Mizutani will focus on a short list of his many pioneer results and will provide an insight into few future developments of his work. References: [1] U. Mizutani, “Introduction to the Electron Theory of Metals”, Cambridge University Press, (2001). [2] U. Mizutani et al., Chem. Soc. Rev., 2012, 41, 6799–6820, DOI: 10.1039/c2cs35161g. [3] https://www.flogen.org/sips2022/Uichiro_Mizutani.php |
