Klaus von Klitzing
Born on 28 June 1943 in Schroda, Germany, Klaus von Klitzing is a physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the integer quantum Hall effect. Von Klitzing had a peripatetic childhood, moving several times with his family because of World War II. He attended the Technical University at Braunschweig, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1969, and then completed his PhD in physics from the University of Würzburg in 1972. Von Klitzing remained at Würzburg for several more years, teaching and conducting research on the effects of strong magnetic fields on semiconductors. To continue his research, he needed facilities with ever more powerful superconducting magnets, so he spent time at both Oxford University’s Clarendon Laboratory and the High Magnetic Field Laboratory at the Institut Laue–Langevin in Grenoble, France, before accepting a professorship at the Technical University of Munich in 1980. While in France, von Klitzing explored the Hall effect—the resistance of a conducting or semiconducting material when a magnetic field is applied perpendicular to the flow direction of electric current. He found that as the strength of the magnetic field was increased, the material’s resistance did not increase continuously, as predicted, but in discrete steps— it was quantized. The value of each step is related to the von Klitzing constant , RK, which is equal to h/e2. (Physics Today covered his pivotal work in its June 1981 issue.) For his discovery of the quantized Hall effect, von Klitzing was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics . That same year he became director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart.
Date in History: 28 June 1943
