Karl Alexander Mller
Müller, Karl Alexander (1927-) is a Swiss physicist who shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in physics with J. Georg Bednorz for their discovery of ceramics that are superconductive (conduct electricity with no resistance) at comparatively high temperatures.
Müller spent his earliest years in Salzburg, Austria, where his father studied music. Müller, and his mother then returned to Switzerland. Following his mother's death when he was 11, Müller went to school in eastern Switzerland and completed his baccalaureate just after World War II (1939-1945). Müller earned the equivalent of a master's degree (1952) and a doctorate (1958) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His doctoral thesis focused on a new ceramic he had developed.
After graduating, Müller became a researcher at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Geneva and managed a group studying magnetic resonance. In 1963, he returned to ceramics research at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. He became an IBM fellow there in 1982.
In the early 1980's, Müller began to research substances that would become superconductive at higher temperatures than previously obtained. He hired Ph.D. student J. Georg Bednorz to help him test oxides for higher-temperature superconductivity. In 1986, Müller and Bednorz achieved superconductivity in a recently developed barium-lanthanum-copper oxide at a temperature of 35 K, 12 degrees higher than previously achieved. The following year, a team at the University of Houston achieved superconductivity in similar ceramics at 90 K. At that temperature, the ceramic superconductors could be cooled by liquid nitrogen, which is easier to handle and make than liquid helium and much less expensive.
Although scientists often wait many years for their work to be recognized, Bednorz and Müller were awarded the Nobel Prize less than two years after their discovery.