Johannes Georg Bednorz

J. Georg Bednorz received his diploma in crystallography and mineralogy from the University of Münster in Westphalia. During his tenure as a student, he had conducted several research visits and the experimental component of his diploma work at the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory. In 1977, he joined the Institute of Solid-State Physics at ETH Zurich to pursue his Ph.D. In 1982, he became a research staff member at the IBM research laboratory in Zurich. One year later, he and his colleague K. Alex Müller initiated an ambitious project to search for superconductivity in ceramic oxides. In 1986, they could confirm their unconventional idea by the discovery of superconductivity in copper oxide-based materials at surprisingly high temperatures. Both J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 for their discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in ceramic materials.