Ivar Giaever Biography

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World of Scientific Discovery on Ivar Giaever

Giaever was born in Bergen, Norway, on April 5, 1929. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1952. After serving a year in the Norwegian army and a year as a government patent examiner, Giaever emigrated to Canada. There he worked for the General Electric Company. In 1956 he moved to General Electric's Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York. In 1964, after six years of night school classes, he received his Ph.D. in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In 1973, Giaever shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Brian Josephson and Leo Esaki for research on tunneling in superconductors. According to classical physics, no current should flow between two metals separated by a nonconductor. The nonconductor represents an "energy barrier" through which current can flow only if electrons that make up the current have more energy than does the barrier.

The theory of quantum mechanics, however, provides an alternative interpretation of this situation. It suggests that some electrons will have a small, but non-zero, chance of passing through the energy barrier even if they have less energy than the barrier. This process has become known as tunneling since electrons are thought to "tunnel" their way through the energy barrier.

Giaever decided to investigate the process of tunneling in superconducting materials. Superconductors are materials that lose all resistance to the flow of electric current. The phenomenon occurs most commonly at temperatures close to absolute zero.

Giaever studied the process of tunneling when two sheets of the same metal ( aluminum) are joined by a nonconductor and when two unlike metals (aluminum and lead) are joined by a nonconductor. He found a linear relationship between current and voltage in the former instance, and a highly nonlinear relationship in the second. Based on these results, Giaever was able to draw a number of conclusions about the energy state of the electrons in the metals he studied. This research has contributed to a much better understanding of the nature of superconducting materials.

After his work on tunneling, Giaever decided to turn his attention to a totally different field of research, biophysics. He became interested in the study of immunology, with special attention to the behavior of protein molecules on solid surfaces. Giaever continued to work at the General Electric Research and Development Center in Schenectady until 1988, when he accepted an appointment as Institute Professor of Science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He remains there today, and also serves as professor-at-large at the University of Oslo. In 1981 he founded Applied Biophysics, Inc., a small company that develops electronic sensing devices. Giaever still operates as the company's president.