Alain Delapalme (1931–2016) joined the Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires, Grenoble (CENG), in the mid-1950s after his studies and military service in a navy ship off North Africa. The first French beam-reactor (Melusine) built in Grenoble became critical in 1958, and Alain was responsible for setting up a polarized-neutron diffractometer there. This was an exciting time with Louis Néel head of the CRNS in Grenoble, and already discussions about building a larger reactor that later with German cooperation became the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble.
In the mid-1960s he went for a year to Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, where he worked with Lester Corliss and Julius Hastings just as experiments started (1965) at the High-Flux Beam Reactor (HFBR). He is an author of one of the more famous papers from the HFBR, on the critical scattering from RbMnF3, a paper 40 pages long, published in Physical Review in 1971.
I had the pleasure of working with him when I first went to Grenoble in the mid-1970s, and he played a key role in the discovery of the charge-density wave in uranium metal by realizing the power of the neutron Laue camera at the ILL, which had been constructed by Jean-Claude Marmeggi. An exposure at low temperature showed the presence of a structural distortion that is incommensurate in all three principal crystallographic directions! This work, published in 1980, changed the direction of research in uranium and solved a long-standing mystery.
In the late 1970s he left Grenoble and went, as head of the diffraction group, to the Laboratoire Léon Brillouin to assist in the instrumentation for the 1980 start-up of the Orphée reactor at Saclay. He continued experiments at Orphée and ILL, Grenoble, but had to retire in the early 1990s, as at that time working beyond 60 was not allowed by the CEA. He then devoted himself to helping young people in Paris who felt excluded from society, and he was delighted to find his scientific training was of great value also in human relations.
He greatly enjoyed doing experiments and his rigorous French mathematical training was often crucial to their interpretation. He was the father of four vivacious daughters, one of whom sadly passed away from cancer last year, and a multitude of grandchildren. He was a man of many talents and interests, and he and his wife Elizabeth greatly enjoyed good conversation with good wine and food, especially at their beautifully restored farm house in the Silogne. We shall miss him.