Heinrich RohrerBorn 6 Jun 1933.Swiss physicist who, with Gerd Binnig, received half of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint invention of the scanning tunneling microscope. (Ernst Ruska received the other half of the prize.) Ruska's electron microscope of the 1930s was unable to show surface structure at the atomic level. Rohrer and Binnig began work in 1978 on a scanning tunneling microscope in which a fine probe passes within a few angstroms of the surface of the sample. A positive voltage on the probe enables electrons to move from the sample to the probe by the tunnel effect, and the detected current can used to keep the probe at a constant distance from the surface. As the probe moves in parallel lines, a 3D image of the surface can be constructed. |
