Maximilian Haider (born 23 January 1950 in Freistadt, Austria) is an Austrian physicist.
He studied Physics at the University of Kiel and the Technische Universität Darmstadt, where he received his doctoral degree with a thesis entitled "Design, construction and testing of a corrected electron energy loss spectrometer with large dispersion and a large acceptance angle" (in German: "Entwurf, Bau und Erprobung eines korrigierten Elektronen-Energieverlust-Spektrometers mit grosser Dispersion und grossem Akzeptanzwinkel"). In 1989 he became Group Leader within the Physical Instrumentation Program at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) where he had already performed some experiments during his doctoral studies.
He is honorary professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT); [1] co-founder, senior advisor and former president of Corrected Electron Optical Systems GmbH (CEOS), a German company that manufactures correction components for electron microscopes. [2]
He won the 2011 Wolf Prize in Physics, along with Harald Rose and Knut Urban, for his contributions to electron microscopy, [3] specifically for the development of a device to correct electron-optical aberration using magnetic multipole lenses. Their work allowed electron microscopes to achieve a resolution of about 50 pm, comparable to the radius of the smallest atom. The three started working together in 1992. Haider built the first prototype and he is the founder (with Joachim Zach in 1996) of the German company Corrected Electron Optical Systems GmbH (CEOS), which manufactures and sells their invention.
In 2005 Haider, Zach and their company CEOS received the Dr.-Rudolf-Eberle Prize (Innovation prize from Baden-Württemberg). [4]
Haider, Rose and Urban also received the Karl-Heinz-Beckurts Prize in 2006 and the Honda Prize in 2008. [5]
In 2008 he became honorary professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
A symposium on "Advances in Corrected Electron Microscopy in Materials Science and Biology" was held in honor of his 60th birthday on 19 February 2010 in Heidelberg. [6]
Haider also received the 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award [7] in Basic Sciences, along with Harald Rose and Knut Urban, for greatly enhancing the resolving power of electron microscopy by developing aberration-corrected electron optics, a breakthrough enabling subatomic precision.
In 2015 he also received the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Microscopical Society (Hon FRMS) [8] and the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) Award. [9]
In 2020 he received the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience (together with Harald Rose and Knut Urban and Ondrej Krivanek). [10]
An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of electrons as a source of illumination. They use electron optics that are analogous to the glass lenses of an optical light microscope to control the electron beam, for instance focusing them to produce magnified images or electron diffraction patterns. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times smaller than that of visible light, electron microscopes have a much higher resolution of about 0.1 nm, which compares to about 200 nm for light microscopes. Electron microscope may refer to:
In optics, chromatic aberration (CA), also called chromatic distortion, color aberration, color fringing, or purple fringing, is a failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same point. It is caused by dispersion: the refractive index of the lens elements varies with the wavelength of light. The refractive index of most transparent materials decreases with increasing wavelength. Since the focal length of a lens depends on the refractive index, this variation in refractive index affects focusing. Since the focal length of the lens varies with the color of the light different colors of light are brought to focus at different distances from the lens or with different levels of magnification. Chromatic aberration manifests itself as "fringes" of color along boundaries that separate dark and bright parts of the image.
Fred Kavli was a Norwegian-American businessman and philanthropist. He was born on a small farm in Eresfjord, Norway. He founded the Kavlico Corporation, located in Moorpark, California. Under his leadership, the company became one of the world's largest suppliers of sensors for aeronautic, automotive, and industrial applications supplying General Electric and the Ford Motor Company.
Sumio Iijima is a Japanese physicist and inventor, often cited as the inventor of carbon nanotubes. Although carbon nanotubes had been observed prior to his "invention", Iijima's 1991 paper generated unprecedented interest in the carbon nanostructures and has since fueled intense research in the area of nanotechnology.
Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) is a German national research institution that pursues interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, information, and bioeconomy. It operates a broad range of research infrastructures like supercomputers, an atmospheric simulation chamber, electron microscopes, a particle accelerator, cleanrooms for nanotechnology, among other things. Current research priorities include the structural change in the Rhineland lignite-mining region, hydrogen, and quantum technologies. As a member of the Helmholtz Association with roughly 6,800 employees in ten institutes and 80 subinstitutes, Jülich is one of the largest research institutions in Europe.
The Transmission Electron Aberration-Corrected Microscope (TEAM) Project is a collaborative research project between four US laboratories and two companies. The project's main activity is design and application of a transmission electron microscope (TEM) with a spatial resolution below 0.05 nanometers, which is roughly half the size of an atom of hydrogen.
Sir John Brian Pendry, is an English theoretical physicist known for his research into refractive indices and creation of the first practical "Invisibility Cloak". He is a professor of theoretical solid state physics at Imperial College London where he was head of the department of physics (1998–2001) and principal of the faculty of physical sciences (2001–2002). He is an honorary fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and an IEEE fellow. He received the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience "for transformative contributions to the field of nano-optics that have broken long-held beliefs about the limitations of the resolution limits of optical microscopy and imaging.", together with Stefan Hell, and Thomas Ebbesen, in 2014.
Otto Scherzer was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to electron microscopy.
David J. Smith is a Regents' Professor of physics at Arizona State University. He is an Australian experimental physicist and his research is focussed on using the electron microscope to study the microstructure of different materials. He is a pioneer in high-resolution relectron microscopy technique and is very well known in his field. His interests are focused on thin films, nanostructures, novel materials and magnetism.
Winfried Denk is a German physicist. He built the first two-photon microscope while he was a graduate student in Watt W. Webb's lab at Cornell University, in 1989.
Louis Eugene Brus is an American chemist, and currently the Samuel Latham Mitchell Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University. He is the co-discoverer of the colloidal semi-conductor nanocrystals known as quantum dots. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Christoph Gerber is a Swiss physicist and professor at the University of Basel. He is the co-inventor of the atomic force microscope (AFM), together with Gerd Binnig and Calvin Quate.
Thomas Ebbesen is a Franco-Norwegian physical chemist and professor at the University of Strasbourg in France, known for his pioneering work in nanoscience. He received the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience “for transformative contributions to the field of nano-optics that have broken long-held beliefs about the limitations of the resolution limits of optical microscopy and imaging”, together with Stefan Hell, and Sir John Pendry in 2014.
Knut W. Urban is a German physicist. He has been the Director of the Institute of Microstructure Research at Forschungszentrum Jülich from 1987 to 2010.
Ondrej L. Krivanek is a Czech/British physicist resident in the United States, and a leading developer of electron-optical instrumentation. He won the Kavli Prize for Nanoscience in 2020 for his substantial innovations in atomic resolution electron microscopy.
Harald Rose is a German physicist.
Andreas J. Heinrich is a physicist working with scanning tunneling microscopy, quantum technology, nanoscience, spin excitation spectroscopy, and precise atom manipulation. He worked for IBM Research in Almaden for 18 years, during which time he developed nanosecond scanning tunneling microscopy which provided an improvement in time resolution of 100,000 times, and combined x-ray absorption spectroscopy with spin excitation spectroscopy. In 2015 his team combined STM with electron spin resonance, which enables single-atom measurements on spins with nano-electronvolt precision REF1, REF2. In 2022 his team demonstrated the extension of ESR-STM to individual molecules REF3. Heinrich was also principal investigator of the stop-motion animated short film A Boy and His Atom filmed by moving thousands of individual atoms. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of the Heinrich Rohrer Medal of the Japan Society of Vacuum and Surface Science.
Peter David Nellist, is a British physicist and materials scientist, currently a professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford. He is noted for pioneering new techniques in high-resolution electron microscopy.
Nion is a manufacturer of scanning transmission electron microscopes (STEMs) based in Kirkland, Washington.
Aberration-Corrected Transmission Electron Microscopy (AC-TEM) is the general term for using electron microscopes where electro optical components are introduced to reduce the aberrations that would otherwise reduce the resolution of images. Historically electron microscopes had quite severe aberrations, and until about the start of the 21st century the resolution was quite limited, at best able to image the atomic structure of materials so long as the atoms were far enough apart. Theoretical methods of correcting the aberrations existed for some time, but could not be implemented in practice. Around the turn of the century the electron optical components were coupled with computer control of the lenses and their alignment; this was the breakthrough which led to significant improvements both in resolution and the clarity of the images. As of 2024 both correction of optical as well as chromatic aberrations is standard in many commercial electron microscopes. They are extensively used in many different areas of science.