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Johannes Georg Bednorz Biography

Johannes Georg Bednorz

(Neuenkirchen, 1950) German physicist, whose research, in collaboration with K.Alexander Müller, led him to discover in 1986 a new type of material that exhibited superconductivity at significantly lower temperatures lower than the metallic alloys used until then.In recognition of the new possibilities that their discovery opened, Bednorz and Müller shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987.

In 1968 he began his studies in Chemistry at the University of Münster, but he disliked the impersonal atmosphere, As a result of the large number of students, he specialized in crystallography, a field of mineralogy halfway between Chemistry and Physics.In 1972 he agreed to spend the three summer months as an intern at IBM's research laboratory in the city of Zürich.This decision marked the course of his life since the department of which he became part was headed by K.Alex Müller, with whom he would later collaborate in the research that earned him the Nobel Prize.

In this laboratory, under the direction of Hans Jörg Scheel, he learned different methods of crystal growth, material characterization and solid state chemistry.During his stay there he was impressed by the freedom with which, even as a student, he was able to work and learn from his mistakes, and thus lose the fear of dealing with new problems from his own point of view.

In 1977 began his doctoral thesis at the Solid State Physics Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich under the direction of Heini Gränicher and K.Alex Müller, who knew the growth and characterization work that he had carried out on perovskites, a particular class of ceramics with metallic oxides in their composition.Müller encouraged him to continue with him and together they began a closer collaboration.

In 1982 he joined the staff of researchers at the IBM laboratories in Zürich.After finishing his doctoral thesis on the growth and characterization of solid solutions of the perovskite type (which represented the culmination of the work begun in 1972) Bednorz began to study this type of materials from the point of view of their structural, dielectric and ferroelectric properties..

In 1983, the collaboration with Alex Müller was further intensified, with the aim of finding an oxide that had a less low transition temperature to superconductivity than the metal alloys used to study the phenomenon.of superconductivity.After analyzing hundreds of oxides, they found, at the end of 1986, a ceramic with a mixed phase of barium oxide, lanthanum and copper that was still superconducting at 33 K, which opened new avenues of research by showing that materials other than metals they exhibited superconductivity at temperatures significantly higher than these.

Shortly after their results were published, numerous research groups around the world followed the line of research opened by Bednorz and Müller and came up with perovskites capable of being superconducting at temperatures higher than that of nitrogen boiling ( 77.35 K,-195.65 ° C).

Until 1986 the superconducting substances that were known had to be cooled with liquid helium because their superconducting properties disappeared a few degrees above the boiling temperature of this element, which is of 4,215 K (-268,785 ° C).The scarcity of He on Earth makes the process of obtaining and liquefying it more expensive, making it difficult to find profitable applications for such superconducting materials.

The investigations of Bednorz and Müller initiated the development of a new type of superconducting materials, the so-called high-temperature superconductors .Such a name does not mean that in these materials the resistance to the passage of electric current is zero at the temperatures that are usually considered high, not even at room temperature, but that it is enough to cool them by means of liquid nitrogen, instead of helium, so that they disappear.this resistance.Nitrogen is much more abundant than helium (it is the major element in the composition of the Earth's atmosphere) and is easy to obtain, so Bednorz and Müller's discovery actually opened the door to profitable applications of superconducting materials.

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