Johannes Georg Bednorz

Johannes Georg Bednorz (born May 16, 1950) is a physicist at the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory. He is best known for his role in the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity, for which he shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Life and work

Bednorz was born in Neuenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany to Anton and Elisabeth Bednorz, both from Silesia.^[1]

In 1968, Bednorz started his studies in Mineralogy at the University of Münster. After working for a while at IBM's Zürich lab, he started his PhD in the Laboratory of Solid State Physics at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), supervised by Prof. Heini Gränicher and K. Alex Müller (who was a professor at ETH Zürich as well as working for IBM).

In 1982, he moved back to IBM's Zürich lab. There, he joined Müller's ongoing research into superconductivity.^[2]

In 1983, Bednorz and Müller began a systematic study of the electrical properties of ceramics formed from transition metal oxides, and in 1986, they succeeded in inducing superconductivity in a lanthanum barium copper oxide (LaBaCuO, also known as LBCO); the oxide's critical temperature (T_c) was 35 K, a full 12 K higher than the previous record. This discovery stimulated a great deal of additional research in high-temperature superconductivity on cuprate materials with structures similar to LBCO, soon leading to the discovery of compounds such as BSCCO (T_c 107K) and YBCO (T_c 92K).

In 1987, Bednorz and Müller were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their important break-through in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials".^[3]

References

1. ^ Nobel prize autobiography
2. ^ J. G. Bednorz and K. A. Müller (1986). "Possible high T_c superconductivity in the Ba−La−Cu−O system". Z. Physik, B 64 (1): 189–193. Bibcode 1986ZPhyB..64..189B. doi:10.1007/BF01303701. 
3. ^ Nobel prize website

External links

• Pioneers in Electricity and Magnetism - Johannes Georg Bednorz, National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.