Background
Bednorz was born in Neuenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany to elementary-school teacher Anton and piano teacher Elisabeth Bednorz, as the youngest of four children.
Bednorz was born in Neuenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany to elementary-school teacher Anton and piano teacher Elisabeth Bednorz, as the youngest of four children.
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich.
Although as teenager he did eventually learn to play the violin and trumpet) In high school he developed an interest in the natural sciences, focusing on chemistry, which he could learn in a hands-on manner through experiments. In 1968, Bednorz enrolled at the University of Münster to study chemistry. However, he soon felt lost in the large body of students and opt to switch to the much less popular subject of crystallography, a subfield of mineralogy at the interface of chemistry and physics.
The experience here would shape his further career, not only did he meet his later collaborator K. Alex Müller, the head of the physics department, but he also experienced the atmosphere of creativity and freedom cultivated at the International Business Machines Corporation lab which he credits as a strong influence on his way of conducting science.
After another visit in 1973, he came to Zurich in 1974 for six months to do the experimental part of his diploma work. Here he grew crystals of SrTiO3, a ceramic material belonging to the family of perovskites.
Müller, himself interested in perovskites, urged him to continue his research, and after obtaining his master"s degree from Münster in 1977 Bednorz started a Doctor of Philosophy at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) under supervision of Heini Gränicher and Alex Müller. In 1982, after obtaining his Doctor of Philosophy, he joined the International Business Machines Corporation laboratory
There, he joined Müller"s ongoing research on superconductivity.
In 1983, Bednorz and Müller began a systematic study of the electrical properties of ceramics formed from transition metal oxides, and in 1986 they succeeded in inducing superconductivity in a lanthanum barium copper oxide (LaBaCuO, also known as LBCO). The oxide"s critical temperature (Tc) was 35 K, a full 12 K higher than the previous record. This discovery stimulated a great deal of additional research in high-temperature superconductivity on cuprate materials with structures similar to LBCO, soon leading to the discovery of compounds such as BSCCO (Tc 107K) and YBCO (Tc 92K).
In the same year Bednorz was appointed an International Business Machines Corporation Fellow.
Thirteenth Fritz London Memorial Award (1987).
Thirteenth Fritz London Memorial Award (1987) Dannie Heineman Prize of the Göttingen Academy (1987) Robert Wichard Pohl Prize (1987) Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize (1988) Marcel Benoist Prize (1986) Nobel Prize for Physics (1987) James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials (1988) Minnie Rosen Award (1988) Viktor Mortiz Goldschmidt Prize Otto Klung Prize.
