Rohrer, Heinrich

Related Category: Physics: Biographies

1933–, Swiss physicist, Ph.D. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 1963. 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. For their innovation they shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Ernst Ruska, who invented (1933) the first electron microscope.