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Klaus von Klitzing, Director Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, Germany
Nobel Laureate, Physics 1985
Wednesday, October 13, 2021
4:00-5:00 PM
Location: Rackham Amphiteatre
University of Michigan Ann Arbor Campus
Seating Began at 3:00 PM!
This event was live-streamed. See below for details.*
A Nocturnal Discovery that Triggered a Revolution in International Metrology
The quantum Hall effect, an unexpected discovery at 2 a.m. on the 5th of February 1980, led to my Nobel Prize in 1985 and to a realization of a resistance standard based on fundamental constants. Since fundamental constants are the most stable quantities in our universe, a new international system of units based on constants of nature was introduced in 2019. The talk presents an overview of the quantum Hall effect and its importance for our new definition of the mass unit kilogram.
Biographical Sketch for Dr. von Klitzing
Dr. von Klitzing studied physics at the University of Braunschweig and received his Ph.D. from the University of Würzburg in 1972. After research stays in England, the USA, and France, he became a Professor at the Technical University in Munich in 1980. Since 2018 he is director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1985 for discovering the Quantum Hall Effect. His present research activities concentrate on quantum transport in low-dimensional electronic systems.
He has published more than 500 papers and received a large number of national and international awards. He holds 22 honorary degrees. He is a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina and a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Location: Rackham Amphitheatre
University of Michigan Ann Arbor Campus
915 E. Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
City Parking: Maynard Street Parking Structure
324 Maynard St, Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Per University policy, each guest wore a face covering. The University also required guests entering U-M buildings to complete a ResponsiBLUE screening via their smartphone: https://responsiblue.umich.edu/sign-in
*The live-streamed lecture was available at 4:00 pm on YouTube.
