Nobel Laureate Physicist Visits Bilkent
In 1981, Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Binnig invented the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), which provided the first images of individual atoms on the surfaces of materials. Rohrer and Binnig were awarded 1986 Nobel Prize in physics.
Rohrer was born in Buchs, Switzerland on June 6, 1933. Dr. Rohrer received his B.S. degree in 1955 and Ph.D. in 1960 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. After post-doctoral work at the same institute and later at Rutgers University in the United States, Dr. Rohrer joined IBM's newly formed Zurich Research Laboratory. Among other things, he studied Kondo materials and antiferromagnetism 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. Dr. Rohrer's works on scanning tunneling microscopy have contributed substantially to the initiation of nanoscience and -technology.
Dr. Rohrer is one of the worldwide leaders in nanotechnology and delivered a lecture on nanotechnology on Monday, October 4 as part of the 100th international Conference of the Applied Economics Association held last weekend at Bilkent. After the talk, Dr. Rohrer visited the researchers at UNAM (Institute of Materials Science and Nanotechnology).