Heinrich Rohrer

Heinrich Rohrer married Rose-Marie Egger in the summer of 1961. She was a supportive and stabilizing influence in his life. They had two daughters, namely, Doris Rohrer and Ellen Rohrer.

Quite an outdoorsy man, he went on a four-month camping trip through the USA in 1963. During his sabbatical at Santa Barbara, he took his family on two extended camping trips and showed them the States from coast to coast.

He passed away on May 16, 2013, at his residence in Wollerau, Switzerland. His death was attributed to natural causes. He was 79 years old.

Heinrich Rohrer was born half an hour later than his twin sister on June 6, 1933, in Buchs, St. Gallen, Switzerland. He was the third of three children born to Katharina Gantenbein and Hans Heinrich Rohrer.

His childhood was relatively normal with a mix of play, farm work, and school to keep him occupied. When the family relocated to the city of Zürich in 1949, it was a change in lifestyle from country to town.

Being exposed to the country life, he was inclined towards classical languages and natural sciences. In 1951, he was enrolled at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and he started favoring Physics. At ETH, he was taught by notable Professors G. Busch, Wolfgang Pauli, and Paul Scherrer. He earned his B.S. in 1955.

Four years later, in 1955, he began working on his Ph.D. in experimental physics. He was entrusted with measuring the length changes of superconductors at the magnetic field-induced superconducting transition. He conducted his research after midnight because the mechanical transducers were sensitive to vibrations. In 1960, he received his Ph.D.

Heinrich Rohrer took a sabbatical from his studies to complete his military service (basic training) with the Swiss mountain infantry.

A honeymoon to the United States stoked his interests and he spent two post-graduation years working on thermal conductivity of type-II superconductors and metals. Under the supervision of Professor Bernie Serin, he worked on this research at ‘Rutgers University’, New Jersey.

In 1963, after his return from the States, Professor Ambros Speiser, Director of the IBM Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon, Switzerland, offered him an opportunity to work as a research assistant. He agreed with the encouragement of Professor Bruno Lüthi and joined the company in December.

At IBM, he mainly worked on Kondo systems with magnetoresistance in pulsed magnetic fields for two years and later shifted his interest to magnetic phase diagrams. This led to his entry into the field of critical phenomena. He was encouraged by K. Alex Müller to focus on the bicritical and tetracritical behavior and finally on the random-field problem.

During 1974 and 1975, he spent his time at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He worked with Professor Vince Jaccarino and Dr. Alan King and studied ‘nuclear magnetic resonance’.

Heinrich Rohrer was one of the primary designers of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM). It was an l invention that allowed for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Many practical applications of the STM include better lithography, atomic disposition of metals which can later be used as nano devices, rotation of individual bonds within single molecules, and many more.

He authored ‘Das Rastertunnelmikroskop’ (The Scanning Tunneling Microscope) with Gerd Binnig, in 1987.