Gerhard Meyer (physicist)

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Gerhard Meyer (* 1957 ) is a German solid state physicist at the IBM research laboratory in Rüschlikon . He works in the field of atomic force microscopy (AFM) and nanoscience . Under his leadership, AFM became a tool for chemical structural research (the first imaging of complex molecules in organic chemistry in atomic resolution with the AFM).

Meyer studied physics at the Leibniz University in Hanover with a doctorate in 1987. Afterwards he was a post-doctoral student at the IBM research laboratories in Yorktown Heights and at the Max Planck Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Göttingen until 1991 . Since 1991 he has been a research assistant at the Free University of Berlin with Karl-Heinz Rieder .

With the scanning probe microscope he obtained images of atomic and molecular orbitals and targeted manipulation at the atomic level, including the first-time targeted initiation and observation of a chemical reaction on individual molecules. He also observed directly how atoms in a molecule change position in the course of a reaction. He attaches a single molecule to the tip of the scanning probe microscope (a variant of the atomic force microscope). For example, in organic chemistry, a carbon dioxide molecule is taken on top. If the oxygen atom shows down, the tip reacts to the electron density (mutual repulsion of the electrons of the oxygen atom and those of the sample). The technology was developed by Gerhard Meyer at the IBM laboratory in Rüschlikon with the physicist Leo Gross . The images of atoms and molecules found their way into many textbooks. They succeeded in achieving the first atomic resolution of the structure of a molecule ( pentacene ) with the atomic force microscope (Gerhard Meyer with Leo Gross, Fabian Mohn, Nikolaj Moll from IBM and Peter Liljeroth from the University of Utrecht), published in Science in 2009, which received a great deal of attention. In the same year, atomic force microscopy was used to measure the state of charge of atoms, also published in Science. In addition to his expertise in solid-state and chemical physics, Meyer is also an expert in instrumentation, electronics, software and hardware.

In 2013, Felix R. Fischer and Michael Crommie at the University of Berkeley made the first direct recording of how an organic molecule changes in a reaction (phenolic rings connected via carbon atoms with triple bonds (ethyne) were the starting molecule; after heating they formed different interconnected ring structures of 5 and 6 rings that could be shown). In doing so, they demonstrated that the technology provided a new, much more direct method of structure determination in organic chemistry than before (mass spectrometer, NMR or, if the substance could be displayed and crystallized in pure form, X-ray diffraction).

In 2011 he received the Robert Wichard Pohl Prize for his groundbreaking research in the field of scanning probe microscopy and spectroscopy, which among other things enables the visualization of chemical processes and targeted manipulations at the atomic level (laudatory speech). In 2012 he and Leo Gross and Jascha Repp received the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for the work of the group at the IBM Research Center Rüschlikon.

Fonts (selection)

  • A simple low-temperature ultrahigh-vacuum scanning tunneling microscope capable of atomic manipulation, Review of Scientific Instruments, Volume 67, 1996, p. 2960
  • with Karl-Heinz Rieder: Building with Individual Atoms, Physics in Our Time, Volume 31, January 2001, pp. 8-13
  • with Rieder u. a .: Manipulation of atoms and molecules for construction of nanosystems: The scanning tunneling microscope as an operative tool, International Journal of Nanoscience, Volume 2, 2003
  • with Rieder u. a .: The scanning tunneling microscope as an operative tool: doing physics and chemistry with single atoms and molecules, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, Volume 362, 2004
  • Gross, F. Mohn, G. Meyer, J. Repp, FJ Giessibl : Atomic charge states under the atomic force microscope, Physics in our time, Volume 40, 2009, Issue 5
  • L. Gross, F. Mohn, P. Liljeroth, J. Repp, FJ Giessibl, G. Meyer: Measuring the Charge State of an Adatom with Noncontact Atomic Force Microscopy, Science 324, 2009, p. 1428
  • L. Gross, F. Mohn, N. Moll, P. Liljeroth, G. Meyer: The chemical structure of a molecule resolved by atomic force microscopy, Science, Volume 325, 2009, p. 1110
  • L. Gross, F. Mohn, J. Repp, G. Meyer, Matthew Dyer, Mats Persson: Reversible Bond Formation in a Gold-Atom-Organic-Molecule Complex as a Molecular Switch, Phys. Rev. Lett., Volume 105, 2010
  • with L. Gross u. a .: Organic structure determination using atomic-resolution scanning probe microscopy, Nature Chemistry, Volume 2, 2010, p. 821
  • with N. Moll, L. Gross a. a .: The mechanisms underlying the enhanced resolution of atomic force microscopy with functionalized tips, New J. Phys., Volume 12, 2010, p. 125020
  • with L. Gross u. a .: Bond-order discrimination by atomic force microscopy, Science, Volume 337, 2012, p. 1326
  • with L. Gross u. a .: Imaging the charge distribution within a single molecule, Nature Nanotechnology, Volume 7, 2012, p. 227

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Short biography in the article by Rieder and Meyer in Physics in Our Time , January 2001
  2. ↑ Derek Lowe: Das Chemiebuch , Librero 2017, p. 508
  3. ↑ IBM researchers show the inner structure of molecules with atomic resolution for the first time , IBM Zurich 2009
  4. ↑ Interview by Leo Gross in Nature, Volume 465, 2010, p. 455
  5. ↑ Crommie, Fischer, de Oteya et al. a .: Direct Imaging of Covalent Bond Structure in Single-Molecule Chemical Reactions , Science, Volume 340, 2013, p.
personal data
SURNAME Meyer, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1957