K. Alexander Müller

Origins and early life

Karl Alexander Müller was born in Basel on 20 April 1927, the only child of Paul Rudolf Müller, a merchant and musician, and of Irma Feigenbaum, and spent his first years in Salzburg, where his father was studying music.

Work and career

His mother was Jewish according to the reference site Jinfo, which bases this on what he said during a visit to Israel in 2006, when Bar-Ilan University made him an honorary doctor; she took him to her parents' home in Dornach and then to Lugano, and died in his childhood, when he was eleven. He then attended the Evangelical College in Schiers, a Protestant boarding school in eastern Switzerland, and the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland records him as a Protestant.

He studied physics at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where Wolfgang Pauli left a deep mark on him, and took his diploma in 1952 and his doctorate in 1958. After leading a magnetic resonance group at the Battelle Institute in Geneva, he joined the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon in 1963, stayed until 1992 and headed its physics department from 1971 to 1985, while teaching at the University of Zurich.

For some fifteen years he studied strontium titanate and related perovskite oxides, and in 1983 he and the young researcher Georg Bednorz turned away from the usual alloys to search systematically among oxides of copper. In April 1986 they reported that a ceramic of lanthanum, barium and copper oxide became superconducting at 35 kelvin, about twelve degrees above the record that had stood since 1973, and within months laboratories around the world passed 90 kelvin.

Recognition

The 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics went jointly to Bednorz and Müller for their important breakthrough in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials, the year after they had published it. He stayed on as an adviser at the University of Zurich after leaving IBM, and died in Zurich on 9 January 2023, at the age of 95.