K. Alex Müller, Innovator in Ceramic Superconductors, Dies at 95

There’s hope, nevertheless, that high-temperature superconductors might be used sooner or later to levitate trains over tracks, permitting them to maneuver with out mechanical resistance and at excessive speeds unheard-of at this time.

Karl Alex Müller was born in Basel, Switzerland, on April 20, 1927, the one little one of Paul and Irma (Feigenbaum) Müller. Quickly after Alex’s beginning, the household moved to Salzburg, Austria, the place his father was finding out music. Just a few years later, Alex’s dad and mom separated, and Alex and his mom moved to Dornach, Switzerland, close to Basel, to reside together with his maternal grandparents. Alex and his mom then moved to Lugano, an Italian-speaking a part of Switzerland.

His mom died when he was 11. He then spent the following seven years at Evangelical Faculty, a boarding college in Schiers, in japanese Switzerland, solely hardly ever seeing his father, who had remarried and had had one other little one. Alex’s time on the college coincided with the outbreak and finish of World Struggle II.

After finishing his compulsory navy service within the Swiss Military, he enrolled as a pupil on the Swiss Federal Institute of Know-how in Zurich. The usage of atomic weapons towards Japan the earlier yr had stimulated widespread curiosity in nuclear physics, and his incoming freshman class was 3 times the standard dimension, starting research in what was referred to as the “atom bomb semester,” Dr. Müller recalled in an autobiographical sketch for the Nobel committee.

On the institute, he studied beneath Wolfgang Pauli, an Austrian physicist who gained the Nobel Prize in 1945, and Paul Scherrer, a Swiss physicist who would later have a prestigious analysis and engineering institute named for him.

After working for a yr in an institute division specializing in industrial analysis, Dr. Müller entered the doctoral program there and obtained his Ph.D. in 1957.

He labored for the Battelle Memorial Institute in Geneva from 1958 to 1963. He was then employed at IBM Analysis in Zurich. Throughout this time he was additionally a lecturer and professor on the College of Zurich. He was named an IBM Fellow in 1982.