Gerd Binnig
Born	(1947-07-20)20 July 1947 Frankfurt am Main
Fields	Physics
Known for	scanning tunneling microscope, atomic force microscope
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics (1986) The Elliott Cresson Medal (1987)

Gerd Binnig (born 20 July 1947) is a German physicist, and a Nobel laureate.

He was born in Frankfurt am Main and played in the ruins of the city during his childhood. His family lived partly in Frankfurt and partly in Offenbach am Main, and he attended school in both cities. At the age of 10, he decided to become a physicist, but he soon wondered whether he had made the right choice. He concentrated more on music, playing in a band. He also started playing the violin at 15 and played in his school orchestra.

In 1969, he married Lore Wagler, a psychologist, and they have a daughter born in Switzerland and a son born in California. His hobbies are reading, swimming and golf.

In 1978, he accepted an offer from IBM to join their Zürich research group. There, he met Heinrich Rohrer, with whom he shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for their design of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) (the other half of the Prize was awarded to Ernst Ruska).

The team included Christoph Gerber and Edmund Weibel, and they were soon recognized with a number of prizes: the German Physics Prize, the Otto Klung Prize, the Hewlett Packard Prize, the King Faisal Prize and, ultimately, the Nobel Prize.

In 1994 Professor Gerd Binnig founded Definiens which turned in the year 2000 into a commercial enterprise. Today, companies and institutions around the world use Definiens' technology to maximize the value of images and thereby enabling better decisions. Definiens currently focuses on applications for Life Sciences and Earth Sciences. In Life Sciences, Definiens' technology is used to accelerate the drug discovery, development, and diagnostics processes. In Earth Sciences, Definiens' technology enables satellite and aerial image classification and analysis with greater speed, accuracy and insight.

External links[link]

• Pioneers in Electricity and Magnetism - Gerd Binnig National High Magnetic Field Laboratory
• Autobiography of Gerd Binnig

Heinrich Rohrer
Heinrich Rohrer
Born	(1933-06-06) June 6, 1933 (age 79) St. Gallen
Nationality	Swiss
Fields	Physics
Known for	scanning tunneling microscope
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics for 1986 Elliott Cresson Medal (1987)

Heinrich Rohrer (born June 6, 1933) is a Swiss physicist who shared half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gerd Binnig for the design of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) (the other half of the Prize was awarded to Ernst Ruska).

Biography[link]

Rohrer was born in St. Gallen half an hour after his twin sister. He enjoyed a carefree country childhood until the family moved to Zürich in 1949. He enrolled in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in 1951, where he studied with Wolfgang Pauli. His doctoral dissertation was on his work measuring the length changes of superconductors at the magnetic-field-induced superconducting transition, a project begun by Jörgen Lykke Olsen. In the course of his research, he found that he had to do most of his research at night after the city was asleep because his measurements were so sensitive to vibration.

His studies were interrupted by his military service in the Swiss mountain infantry. In 1961, he married Rose-Marie Egger. Their honeymoon trip to the United States included a stint doing research on thermal conductivity of type-II superconductors and metals with Bernie Serin at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

In 1963, he joined the IBM Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon under the direction of Ambros Speiser. The first couple of years at IBM, he studied Kondo systems with magnetoresistance in pulsed magnetic fields. He then began studying magnetic phase diagrams, which eventually brought him into the field of critical phenomena.

In 1974, he spent a sabbatical year at the University of California in Santa Barbara, California studying nuclear magnetic resonance with Vince Jaccarino and Alan King.

External links[link]

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