Klaus Von Klitzing
Von Klitzing, Klaus (1943-) is a German physicist who won the 1985 Nobel Prize in physics for his research into the behavior of electric currents in semiconducting materials in magnetic fields. He has provided a highly accurate method of measuring electrical resistance.
Von Klitzing was born in 1943 in the Polish town of Sroda Wielkopolksa (what was then Schroda in German-occupied Poland). He majored in physics at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, and received his bachelor's degree in 1969. His did graduate work at the University of Wurzburg, where he studied the effects of strong magnetic fields on semiconductors. He earned a Ph.D. degree in 1972 and remained at WuUrzburg as a researcher until 1980. From 1980 to 1984, he was a professor at the Technical University in Munich, and since 1985 has been the director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart.
In the late 1970's, von Klitzing studied the Hall effect, discovered by American physicist Edwin H. Hall in 1879. When applying a magnetic fiela to a conductor, such as a wire or a piece of semiconducting material, Hall discovered a voltage that develops sideways across the conductor. This voltage, called the Hall voltage, increases consistently with the strength of the applied magnetic field and current. In 1980, at the Grenoble High Magnetic Field Laboratory in France, von Klitzing carried out experiments with semiconductors in a powerful magnetic field at temperatures close to absolute zero, and discovered that under those conditions the Hall voltage actually increases in steps. The following year he applied quantum mechanics to explain those jumps, which ultimately provided a method of making extremely accurate measurements of electrical resistance.
He has also been awarded the Walter-Schottky Prize for Solid State Research of the German Physical Society (1981) and the Hewlett Packard Prize of the European Physical Society (1982).