It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Vincent Gillet, who left us at the age of 94.
Vincent Gillet joined the CEA in the late 1950s, where he spent his entire career until his retirement in the 1990s.
A nuclear physicist, he completed his doctoral thesis based on an idea by Gerry Brown (Stony Brook University), under the mentoring of Claude Bloch and Albert Messiah. His thesis, titled « Théorie des spectres des noyaux à couches complètes » (“Theory of the spectra of closed-shell nuclei,”) was published in 1962 and describes the various excited states of the nuclei of carbon-12, oxygen-16, and calcium-40.
Vincent Gillet was part of the Service de physique mathématique and later joined the Service de physique théorique until the early1970. He collaborated with Claude Bloch, Roger Balian, Bertrand Giraud, Mannque Rho, and J. M. Normand of SPhT. With Claude Bloch he served as scientific advisor for the film “Les Physiciens théoriciens” by François Leterrier, produced by ANAFILM for the CEA (around 1967).
He was a visiting researcher at the University of Pittsburgh in 1962 and at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1966.
He served as head of the CEA’s Nuclear Physics Department. Among his achievements, he played a decisive role in the founding of GANIL and the post‑accelerated Tandem at Saclay.
In the early 1990s he worked to organize the CEA’s participation in teaching at newly created universities.
He received the Joliot-Curie Prize of the French Physical Society in 1966 and the Jaffé Prize from the Fondation de l’Institut de France in 1971.
In 1984 he was co‑author, with Michael Danos and Monique Cauvin, of the book “Methods in Relativistic Nuclear Physics.”
The entire Institut de physique théorique shares the sorrow of his family and friends.