Erwin Wilhelm Müller
German American physicist and inventor (1911–1977)
Erwin Wilhelm Müller (or Mueller) (June 13, 1911 – May 17, 1977) was a German physicist who invented the Field Emission Electron Microscope (FEEM), the Field Ion Microscope (FIM), and the Atom-Probe Field Ion Microscope. He and his student, Kanwar Bahadur, were the first people to experimentally observe atoms.
Life and work
Müller was born in Berlin, where he studied at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin) under Gustav Hertz. He received his degree in engineering in 1935 and his doctorate in 1936. Müller worked at the Siemens Research Laboratory, where he invented the field emission microscope in 1936 that allowed resolutions of 2 nanometers.
Müller married Klara Thüssing in 1939, and their only daughter Jutta was born in 1940. Due to the circumstances of war, he also worked at the Stabilovolt Company.
In 1947, he was appointed to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry (renamed to Fritz-Haber-Institut on the occasion of its incorporation into the Max Planck Society in 1953) by Iwan N. Stranski. Here he developed the field ion microscope which, due to its resolution of 0.25 nm, was the first instrument used to observe atoms.
In 1950, he took a teaching appointment at Technische Universität Berlin after finally having completed the required Privatdozent (habilitation).
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q91375. VIAF identifies the subject as 264823401. The Library of Congress control number is n90647791. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1911, 1977, 1935 and 1936.
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This entry incorporates text from “Erwin Wilhelm Müller” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.