John B. Goodenough’s Role in Solid State Chemistry Community: A Thrilling Scientific Tale Told by a French Chemist

Abstract

In this tribute to John B. Goodenough I will describe how John’s talk on the metal-to-nonmetal transition of vanadium oxide VO2, presented at the Bordeaux Conference (September 1964) attended by inorganic chemists, metallurgists, crystallographers, thermodynamicists and physicists, provided a pioneering vision of interdisciplinary research to come. John gave a complete description of the paradigm on how the physical properties of a solid depend on its structure and bonding, by employing the chemical notions as local distortions and interatomic distances as well as the physics notions such as band width and the Hubbard on-site repulsion U. I will illustrate how inspiring John’s ideas were, by discussing the research examples of my own research group in the sixties-seventies. The fundamental approach of John B. Goodenough to Solid State Chemistry, leading particularly to lithium battery applications, is at the heart of the 2019 Nobel Prize awarded to John.