Giaever, Ivar

Ivar Giaever, (born April 5, 1929, Bergen, Norway), Norwegian-born American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson for work in solid-state physics.

Giaever received an engineering degree at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim in 1952 and became a patent examiner for the Norwegian government. In 1954 he migrated to Canada, where he worked as a mechanical engineer with the General Electric Company in Ontario. In 1956 he was transferred to General Electric’s Development Center in Schenectady, New York. There he shifted his interest to physics and did graduate work at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, receiving a Ph.D. in 1964.

Giaever conducted most of his work in solid-state physics and particularly in superconductivity. He pursued the possible applications to superconductor technology of Esaki’s work in tunneling, eventually “marrying,” as he put it, the two concepts to produce superconductor devices that flouted previously accepted limitations and allowed electrons to pass like waves of radiation through “holes” in solid-state devices. Using a sandwich consisting of an insulated piece of superconducting metal and a normal one, he achieved new tunneling effects that led to greater understanding of superconductivity and that provided support for the BCS theory of superconductivity, for which John Bardeen (B), Leon Cooper (C), and John Robert Schrieffer (S) had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1972. It was for this work—based in part on Esaki’s and further developed by Josephson—that Giaever shared the 1973 Nobel Prize with Esaki and Josephson.