Nobel Laureate in Physics, 1986

Heinrich Rohrer was born in 1933 in Buchs (St. Gallen, Switzerland). He received his Ph.D. in Experimental Physics in 1960 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, with a thesis on superconductivity. After a two-year postdoctorate at Rutgers University in Brunswick (New Jersey), in 1963 he joined IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory as Research Staff Assistant and became an IBM Fellow. His research interests include Kondo systems, phase transitions, multicritical phenomena, scanning tunneling microscopy and, most recently, nanomechanics. In 1974-1975 he spent a sabbatical year at the University of California in Santa Barbara, where he worked on nuclear magnetic resonance.

In 1986 he was awarded, together with Gerd Binnig, the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), an instrument which makes it possible to resolve individual atoms, that is, to study in the greatest possible detail the atomic structure of the surface being examined. The STM has been used in field as diverse as semiconductor science, metallurgy, electrochemistry and molecular biology. Moreover, it is a fundamental tool for a new and promising science, nanotechnology, which can be defined as the science of fabricating, characterizing and using structures from the atomic scale up to around 100 nanometers. It has been said that the Scanning Tunneling Microscope is to nanotechnology what the telescope was to astronomy.

The practical value of this invention was recognized in 1984 with the awarding of the King Faisal Prize and the Hewlett Packard Europhysics Prize, and in 1994 with the induction to the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. In addition Heinrich Rohrer is a member of various professional societies and academies, and has received honorary degrees from several universities.

Heinrich Rohrer is married to Rose-Marie Egger and has two daughters, Doris and Ellen. In 1997 he retired from IBM and took research appointments at CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientìficas, Madrid, Spain), and the research institute Riken and Tohoku University in Japan.