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

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There’s hope, nonetheless, that high-temperature superconductors could possibly 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 present.

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 learning music. A number of years later, Alex’s dad and mom separated, and Alex and his mom moved to Dornach, Switzerland, close to Basel, to stay 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 faculty in Schiers, in jap Switzerland, solely hardly ever seeing his father, who had remarried and had had one other little one. Alex’s time on the faculty coincided with the outbreak and finish of World Warfare II.

After finishing his compulsory navy service within the Swiss Military, he enrolled as a scholar on the Swiss Federal Institute of Expertise 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 same old 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 underneath Wolfgang Pauli, an Austrian physicist who received 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. Muller 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.

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