Laureate Biography
Ivar Giaever shared half of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leo Esaki for discovering the so-called tunneling phenomena in solids, a peculiar effect in which elementary particles such as electrons can on occasion break the rules of classical physics and pass through barriers. According to the laws of quantum physics, electrons have a small possibility of passing, or ‘tunneling’, through barriers because they behave like waves as well as particles. Giaevar showed the importance of this effect in superconductors, creating a greater understanding of superconductivity and an extremely accurate method for studying its properties.
Born on 5 April 1929 in Bergen, Norway, Giaever spent his childhood in Toten, where his father was a pharmacist. He attended secondary school in Hamar, and on leaving he went to work in the Raufoss munitions factory. In 1948, he began a degree in mechanical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology. He said that he wasn’t very interested in mechanical engineering and school in general, but he managed to graduate with an average degree in 1952. Around 20 years later an Oslo newspaper would remind him of his student past with the headline “Master in billiards and bridge, almost flunked physics – gets Nobel Prize”.
It was at this time that he married Inger Skramstad, with whom he had four children. This was followed by a brief period of military service as a corporal, after which he worked as a patent examiner for the Norwegian government.
In 1954, Giaever moved to Canada where, following a brief stint as an architect’s aide, he joined the General Electric Company (GEC) in Ontario as a mechanical engineer. Two years later he moved to the USA to take GEC’s engineering courses, and in 1958 he joined their Research and Development Centre in Schenectady, New York. He also began to study for a doctorate in physics, which was awarded by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1964, the year in which he became an American citizen.
It was for his work at GEC’s Research and Development Centre during the early 1960s that Giaever received the Nobel Prize. On the basis of Leo Esaki’s study published in 1958, where he showed the existence of the tunneling effect in semiconductors, Giaever identified a similar effect in superconductors. Giaever discovered that electrons tunnel through a very thin layer of metal (usually an oxide) sandwiched by one normal and one superconducting layer of metal. His observations provided evidence for one of the most important predictions of Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer’s basic theory of superconductivity (for which they received the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics). He later developed his tunneling experiments to create analytical tools, in the form of spectroscopic methods, which can study the properties of superconductivity in great detail.
After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, Giaever studied biophysics at Cambridge University, UK, from 1969 to 1970. He then returned to GEC, where he stayed until 1988, after which he became an Institute Professor at Rensselaer. He is also a professor at the University of Oslo, Norway. Giaever has been awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Prize for his work on tunneling and superconductivity, and he was elected a Coolidge fellow at GEC in 1973.
Nobel Prize in Physics 1973
Ivar Giaever’s Nobel Lecture
Ivar Giaever’s web page
Wikipedia: Ivar Giaever
