Raimond Castaing

Raimond Bernard René Castaing (December 28, 1921 – April 10, 1998), also spelt as Raymond Castaing, was a French solid state physicist and inventor of various materials characterization methods. He was the founder of the French school of microanalysis and is referred to as the father of microanalysis.

Education and career Castaing went to school in Monaco, Condom, and Toulouse. From 1940 he studied physics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (ENS) and at the University of Paris, interrupted by work service in 1943/44. He also attended lectures by Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who taught at the Collège de France, and courses by Alfred Kastler and others at the ENS. In 1946 he graduated from the ENS and from 1947 he was an engineer with the national space research organization ONERA. In 1951 he received his doctorate under the supervision of André Guinier, with the thesis titled Application des sondes électroniques à une méthode d'analyse ponctuelle chimique et cristallographique (Application of electron probes to local chemical and crystallographic analysis). The first demonstration took place in 1960 and further development took place at the Cameca company and there was competition with the SIMS developed in the US by Richard Herzog and Helmut Liebl. In 1952, he became a lecturer (maître de conferences) at the University of Toulouse and from 1956 at the University of Paris. From 1959 he was a professor at the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, where he founded the Laboratory for Solid State Physics with Jacques Friedel and others.