Gerd Binning

Gerd Binnig is a German physicist born in Frankfurt am Main in 1947 and Nobel Prize Winner in Physics in 1986 together with Heinrich Rohrer for the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope.

Biography

At the age of ten he knew he would be a physicist. His family was divided between Frankfurt am Main and Offenbach, so he attended schools in both cities.

In 1969, he married Lore Wagler, a psychologist, they had a daughter born in Switzerland and a son in California. Her hobbies were reading, swimming and golf.

Binnig studied physics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, earning a bachelor's degree in 1973 and remaining there to do a PhD in the group of Werner Martienssen, supervised by Eckhardt Hoenig.

In 1978, he accepted an offer from IBM to work for them in Zurich. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986 together with his company colleague Heinrich Rohrer for inventing the scanning tunneling microscope, which allows individual atoms to be seen, obtaining a very precise image of the surface of a material.

Binnig currently works at the IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich.

Career

In 1978, Binnig accepted an offer from IBM to join their Zurich research group, where he worked with Heinrich Rohrer, Christoph Gerber, and Edmund Weibel. There they developed the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), an instrument for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. The Nobel committee described the effect that the invention of the STM had on science, saying that "entirely new fields are opened up for the study of the structure of matter." The physical principles on which the STMs were known before the IBM team developed STM, but Binnig and his colleagues were the first to solve the significant experimental challenges involved in putting it into practice.

The IBM Zürich team was soon recognized with several awards: the German Physics Prize, the Otto Klung Prize, the Hewlett Packard Prize, and the King Faisal Prize. In 1986, Binnig and Rohrer shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physics, the other half of the prize was awarded to Ernst Ruska.

Between 1985 and 1988, he worked in California. He was at IBM in Almaden Valley, and was a visiting professor at Stanford University.

In 1985, Binnig invented the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) and Binnig, Christoph Gerber, and Calvin Quate went on to develop a working version of this new microscope for insulating surfaces.

In 1987 Binnig was named an IBM Fellow. That same year, he started the physics group at IBM in Munich, in which he worked on creativity and atomic force microscopy.

In 1994 Professor Gerd Binnig founded Definiens which became a commercial company in 2000. The company developed Cognition Network Technology to analyze images just like the human eye and brain are capable of.

In 2016, Binnig won the Kavli Prize for Nanoscience. He became a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters.

The Binnig and Rohrer Center for Nanotechnology, an IBM-owned research facility in Rüschlikon, Zurich, is named after Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer.

Posts

• Patente CH643397: Scanning apparatus for surface analysis using vacuum-tunnel effect at cryogenic temperatures (Gerät zur rasterartigen Oberflächenuntersuchung unter Ausnutzung des Vakuum-Tunneleffekts bei kryogenischen Temperaturen). Angemeldet am 20. September 1979, Anmelder: IBM, Erfinder: Gerd Binnig, Heinrich Rohrer.
• Gerd Binnig, Heinrich Rohrer, C. Gerber und E. Weibel: Tunneling through a Controllable Vacuum Gap, Appl. Phys. Lett. 40, 178 (1982).
• Gerd Binnig, Heinrich Rohrer, C. Gerber und E. Weibel: Surface studies by scanning tunneling microscopy. In: Phys. Rev. Lett. 49/1, S. 57-61 (1982).
• Gerd Binnig: Aus dem Nichts. Über die Kreativität von Natur und Mensch. (1997), ISBN 3-492-21486-X.