Obituary

Heinrich Rohrer, Nobel Laureate and IBM Fellow
1933-2013

Dr. Heinrich Rohrer, IBM Fellow, Nobel Laureate and co-inventor of the scanning tunneling microscope, passed away on the evening of May 16, 2013. He was 79. Dr. Rohrer joined IBM Research - Zurich in December of 1963, where he worked for 34 years.

About Heinrich Rohrer

Heinrich Rohrer was born on June 6, 1933, in Buchs, Switzerland. In 1949, the Rohrer family moved to Zurich and a few years later Heinrich enrolled at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), where he studied Physics under Wolfgang Pauli.

In the summer of 1961, Heinrich married Rose-Marie Egger and their honeymoon in the United States led to a two-year project studying thermal conductivity of type-II superconductors and metals at Rutgers University. Shortly thereafter in 1963, he returned to Switzerland to join the Physics department at the newly founded IBM Research - Zurich Laboratory.

In January of 1979, Heinrich Rohrer and fellow IBM scientist Gerd Binnig submitted their first patent disclosure on the scanning tunneling microscope, which was recognized in 1986 with the Nobel Prize for Physics.

In May of 2011, in the presence of more than 600 guests, the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center was inaugurated in Rueschlikon, Switzerland, as a world-class facility for collaborative research.