Gerd Binnig

Born on 20 July 1947 in Frankfurt, West Germany, Gerd Binnig is a Nobel Prize–winning physicist and coinventor of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). After earning his PhD in physics from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt in 1978, Binnig went to work for IBM in Zurich, Switzerland. With his colleague Heinrich Rohrer, Binnig explored a quantum-mechanical phenomenon called electron tunneling to study the surface characteristics of materials at the atomic level. The technique uses the flow of electrons between a sample material and an extremely fine probe to map the material’s surface. The STM developed by Binnig and Rohrer proved useful in a number of applications, such as revealing the surface structure of crystals, observing chemical reactions, scanning the surface of DNA molecules, and watching viruses escape from cells. Binnig then went on to invent the atomic force microscope . Binnig was just 39 years old when he shared one-half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics with Rohrer for their invention of the STM. The following year Binnig was appointed an IBM fellow. He also worked as a visiting professor at Stanford University. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates Collection, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 20 July 1947