Guy Le Lay

Emeritus Professo, Aix-Marseille University, France

Guy Le Lay, Emeritus Professor at Aix-Marseille University, a renowned specialist in Surface/Nano-Science, graduated as an engineer at the School of Mines in Nancy, France (1968). He became Full Professor in Physics at the University of Provence, (1982), working on the formation of metal/semiconcductor interfaces. By reversing the systems in the 2000s, he pioneered the realization of silicene and germanene in Marseille, which triggered a gold rush for the synthesis of all other two-dimensional artificial single-element materials called Xenes. For these breakthroughs he was the winner of the Prestigious 2025 Prize for Science, awarded every three years by the International Union for Vacuum Science, Technology and Applications, after being the recipient of the International 2021 Fernand Holweck Medal and Prize awarded by the Institute Of Physics and the Société Française de Physique.