Nobel Prize Laureates at the Department of Physics

Studied physics in Frankfurt

Peter Grünberg studied physics at Goethe University Frankfurt and earned his doctorate at TU Darmstadt. At the Jülich Research Center in 1988, he discovered the GMR effect, which enabled the development of modern hard drives with high storage capacity. In 2007, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery. In his honor, the square in front of the physics building on the Riedberg campus was renamed “Grünberg Square.”

Studied physics in Frankfurt

Horst Ludwig Störmer studied physics at Goethe University Frankfurt and earned his doctorate at the University of Stuttgart. He then pursued a career at Bell Laboratories in the United States. In 1982, together with Daniel Chee Tsui, he discovered the fractional quantum Hall effect, in which electrons behave like particles with fractional charges. Horst Ludwig Störmer and Daniel Chee Tsui were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 for this discovery, together with Robert B. Laughlin. 

Studied physics in Frankfurt and received his doctorate from the department in 1978

Gerd Binnig studied and received his doctorate at the Department of Physics at Goethe University Frankfurt. In 1981, at the IBM research laboratory in Zurich, he and Heinrich Rohrer developed the scanning tunneling microscope, which can be used to view surfaces down to the level of individual atoms. For this development, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, together with Ernst Ruska, were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986.

Studied physics in Frankfurt and taught in 1928/1929

Hans Bethe studied physics at Goethe University Frankfurt and LMU Munich, where he received his doctorate in 1928. After completing his doctorate, Bethe was a lecturer at his alma mater for one semester, but was forced to emigrate to the US after the Nazis seized power. He became a professor at Cornell University, where he remained until his retirement. In 1967, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the theoretical explanation of the nuclear reactions that enable energy production in stars.

Article on Hans Bethe in Forschung Frankfurt

Professor of Theoretical Physics (1919–1921)

Max Born studied physics at the universities of Breslau, Heidelberg, Zurich, and Göttingen. He was appointed to Goethe University in 1919 as the successor to Max von Laue, later moving to the University of Göttingen. During the Nazi regime, Max Born was forced to emigrate to England, but he returned to Göttingen after the war. He made a decisive contribution to the development of modern quantum mechanics, in particular through his statistical interpretation of the wave function, which explains how to find the probability of discovering a particle at a specific location. For this, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954.

Professor of Theoretical Physics and Experimental Physics (1914–1921)

Otto Stern studied in Munich, Freiburg, and Breslau, earning his doctorate in 1912. He habilitated in theoretical physics at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1915. During his years in Frankfurt, he worked as an assistant to Max Born and began to focus more on experimental physics. Between 1921 and 1933, Otto Stern was a professor in Rostock and Hamburg, and after the Nazis seized power, he emigrated to the US. He received the Nobel Prize in 1943 for the development of the molecular beam method and for the discovery of the magnetic moment of the proton – and not for the world-famous Stern-Gerlach experiment, which he conducted with Walther Gerlach at the Physikalischer Verein in Frankfurt in 1922.

Professor of Theoretical Physics (1914–1919)

Max von Laue studied physics and mathematics in Strasbourg, Göttingen, Munich, and Berlin, and earned his doctorate working under Max Planck. In 1914, he was appointed as the first professor of theoretical physics at the newly founded Goethe University in Frankfurt, and in 1919 he accepted a professorship in Berlin. In 1914, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of X-ray interference, although the work in which he, together with Walter Friedrich and Paul Knipping, demonstrated the wave characteristics of radiation and the atomic structure of crystals had already been published in 1912.