Centre de Physique des Houches, France, May 25-28, 2010

Triple Lines in Metals and Ceramics
a symposium in honor of Nicolas Eustathopoulos

Third announcement (pdf)
Registration form (rtf)

A triple line is the site of common contact between three phases, be they solid, liquid or vapour. Triple lines are ubiquitous in everyday life but also have considerable importance in materials science. In metals and ceramics, triple lines are found when a liquid contacts a solid, where three crystals meet, or where a liquid meets a grain boundary, at high temperature. In every one of these instances, the triple line is a site of complex phenomena that govern the processing, the microstructure development and the properties of many engineering materials. This complexity arises for a number of reasons: triple lines are dominated by capillarity, are thermodynamically and chemically complex, and furthermore are often sites of singularity, in elasticity for example.

The bulk of the workshop will consist in presentations by invited speakers who contribute a paper, a didactic presentation, and participate in a discussion the overall aim of which is to identify commonality in phenomena at triple lines as well as promising pathways for future research. In addition, shorter time slots will be available for contributing speakers.