Rohrer, Heinrich, 1933–2013, Swiss physicist, Ph.D. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 1960. He joined IBM in 1963 and spent almost his entire career with the company, retiring in 1997. At the IBM Research Laboratory in Zürich, Rohrer and fellow researcher Gerd Binnig built the first scanning tunneling microscope, an instrument so sensitive that it can distinguish individual atoms. The microscope was important to the development of nanotechnology. For their innovation they shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ernst Ruska, who invented (1933) the first electron microscope.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Physics: Biographies
