Heinrich Rohrer

Heinrich Rohrer, along with his colleague, Gerd K. Binnig, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 for his work in scanning tunneling microscopy. Binnig and Rohrer were recognized for developing the powerful microscopy technique, which can form an image of individual atoms on a metal or semiconductor surface by scanning the needle of a tip over the surface at a height of only a few atomic diameters.They shared the award with German scientist Ernst Ruska, designer of the first electron microscope. Born in Buchs, Switzerland, on June 6, 1933, Dr. Rohrer was educated at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1955 and his doctorate degree in 1960. After post-doctoral work at the Swiss Federal Institute and Rutgers University in the United States, Dr. Rohrer joined IBM's newly formed Zurich Research Laboratory, studying, among other things, Kondo materials and antiferromagnets before turning his attention to scanning tunneling microscopy. Dr. Rohrer was appointed an IBM Fellow in 1986, and was manager of the physical sciences department at the Zurich Research Laboratory from 1986 to 1988. He retired from IBM in July 1997.