Néel, Louis Eugène Félix, 1904–2000, French physicist, Ph.D. Univ. of Strasbourg, 1932. He was a professor at the Univ. of Strasbourg from 1932 to 1945, when he joined the faculty at the Univ. of Grenoble; he retired there in 1976. Néel was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics with Hannes Alfvén for his research on antiferromagnetism, in which in which the magnetic moments of the component atoms are equal and parallel but in opposite directions, and on ferrimagnetism, in which the magnetic moments are unequal. The work had important applications in solid-state physics, especially in the development of improved computer memory.
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