Franz Josef Gießibl (* May 27, 1962 in Amerang) is a German physicist and university professor at the University of Regensburg.
Giessibl studied physics from 1982 to 1987 at the Technical University of Munich and at Eidgenössische Technischen Hochschule Zürich. He received a diploma in experimental physics in 1988 with Professor Gerhard Abstreiter and continued with a PhD in physics with Nobel Laureate Gerd Binnig at the IBM Physics Group Munich on atomic force microscopy. After submitting his PhD thesis in the end of 1991, he continued for 6 months as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the IBM Physics Group Munich and moved to Silicon Valley to join Park Scientific Instruments, Inc as a senior scientist and later director of vacuum products from mid 1992 until the end of 1994. He joined the Munich office of management consulting firm McKinsey & Company from 1995 to 1996 as a senior associate. During that time, he invented the qPlus sensor, a new probe for atomic force microscopy and continued experimental and theoretical work on the force microscope at the chair of Professor Jochen Mannhart at University of Augsburg where he received a habilitation in 2001.
In 2006, he joined the faculty at the Department of Physics at the University of Regensburg in Germany. From about 2005, he collaborated with the scanning tunneling microscopy groups of IBM Almaden Research Center and IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and from about 2010 with National Institute of Standards and Technology to help to establish combined scanning tunneling microscopy and atomic force microscopy at ultralow temperatures. He was a visiting fellow at the center for nanoscience and technology (CNST) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a visiting professor at University of Maryland, College Park from fall 2015 to spring 2016.
Franz Giessibl is married and has two sons.
Some of Giessibl's experimental images were the basis for the offset print editions Erster Blick (2000) and Graphit (2004) by visual artist Gerhard Richter. Since 1990, Giessibl completed marathon races in Berlin, Munich, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu and Florence with a personal best of about 3h 5min in 1992 in Munich. He enjoys reading a good book, running, biking, hiking, swimming, flying single engine planes and riding motorcycles.
Giessibl spent most of his professional career improving atomic force microscopy, and published papers on ground breaking experiments, instrumentation and theoretical foundations of atomic force microscopy. Giessibl is the inventor of the qPlus sensor, a sensor for Non-contact atomic force microscopy that relies on a quartz cantilever. His invention has enabled atomic force microscopy to obtain subatomic spatial resolution on individual atoms and submolecular resolution on organic molecules. Today, the qPlus sensor is used in many commercial and homebuilt atomic force microscopes.
1992: Built the first low-temperature force microscope for ultrahigh vacuum with Gerd Binnig (PhD adviser) and Christoph Gerber (JVST 1991) and obtained atomic resolution on KBr with it (Ultramicroscopy 1992). KBr has a very low reactivity, yet major challenges such as jump-to-contact of AFM tip and sample had to be overcome to obtain atomic resolution.
1992: Proposed a mechanism allowing atomic resolution in noncontact-AFM (Phys Rev B 1992).
1994: Solved the problem of imaging reactive samples and obtained for the first time atomic resolution on Silicon 7x7 by force microscopy using frequency-modulation atomic force microscopy in noncontact mode with large amplitudes (Science 1995).
1996: Invented the qPlus sensor, a self sensing AFM quartz sensor that is self sensing (piezoelectric effect), highly stable in frequency and stiff enough to allow sub-Angstrom oscillation amplitudes (patents DE19633546, US6240771).
1997: Introduces a formula that connects frequency shifts and forces for large amplitudes (Phys Rev B 1997).
2000: Observes subatomic resolution on tip features (Science 2000).
2001: Invents an algorithm to deconvolute forces from frequency shifts (Appl Phys Lett 2001).
2003: Extended version of his habilitation thesis is published in Reviews of Modern Physics (RMP 2003).
2003: Obtaines atomically resolved lateral force microscopy (PNAS 2003).
2004: Achieves sub-Angstrom resolution on tip features using a qPlus sensor in a low temperature AFM using higher harmonic force microscopy (Science 2004).
2005-2008: Helps to spread out qPlus sensor technology to IBM Research Laboratories Almaden and Rüschlikon, leading to measurements of forces that act during atomic manipulation (Science 2008) and single-electron charges on single gold atoms (Science 2009).
2012: Introduces carbon monoxide front atom identification (COFI), a method for the atomic and subatomic characterization of scanning probe tips (Science 2012).
2013: Observes evidence for superexchange interaction and very low noise data of exchange interactions between CoSm tips and antiferromagnetic NiO (Phys Rev Lett 2013).
2013: Observes atomic resolution in ambient conditions without special sample preparation (Phys Rev B 2013).
2014: Measurement of CO-CO interactions by lateral force microscopy (Science 2014).
2015: Atomic resolution of few atom metal clusters and subatomic resolution of single metal atoms (Science 2015).
2016: Simultaneous inelastic tunneling spectroscopy and AFM (Phys Rev B 2016), first AFM with superconducting tips (Phys Rev B 2016), multifrequency AFM using qPlus sensor (Appl Phys Lett 2016)
Giessibl, F.J.; Binnig, G. (1992). "Investigation of the (001) cleavage plane of potassium bromide with an atomic force microscope at 4.2 K in ultra-high vacuum". Ultramicroscopy. 42 (5682): 281. doi:10.1016/0304-3991(92)90280-w.
Giessibl, F.J. (1995). "Atomic Resolution of the Silicon (111)-(7x7) Surface by Atomic Force Microscopy". Science. 267: 68. Bibcode:1995Sci...267...68G. doi:10.1126/science.267.5194.68.
Giessibl, F.J. (1997). "Forces and frequency shifts in atomic-resolution dynamic-force microscopy". Phys. Rev. B. 56: 16010. Bibcode:1997PhRvB..5616010G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.56.16010.
Giessibl, F.J. (2003). "Advances in atomic force microscopy". Rev. Mod. Phys. 75: 949. Bibcode:2003RvMP...75..949G. arXiv:cond-mat/0305119 . doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.75.949.
Hembacher, S. (16 July 2004). "Force Microscopy with Light-Atom Probes". Science. 305 (5682): 380–383. Bibcode:2004Sci...305..380H. PMID 15192156. doi:10.1126/science.1099730.
Ternes, M.; Lutz, C. P.; Hirjibehedin, C. F.; Giessibl, F. J.; Heinrich, A. J. (22 February 2008). "The Force Needed to Move an Atom on a Surface". Science. 319 (5866): 1066–1069. Bibcode:2008Sci...319.1066T. PMID 18292336. doi:10.1126/science.1150288.
Gross, L.; Mohn, F.; Liljeroth, P.; Repp, J.; Giessibl, F. J.; Meyer, G. (11 June 2009). "Measuring the Charge State of an Adatom with Noncontact Atomic Force Microscopy". Science. 324 (5933): 1428–1431. Bibcode:2009Sci...324.1428G. PMID 19520956. doi:10.1126/science.1172273.
Weymouth, A. J.; Wutscher, T.; Welker, J.; Hofmann, T.; Giessibl, F. J. (June 2011). "Phantom Force Induced by Tunneling Current: A Characterization on Si(111)". Physical Review Letters. 106 (22): 226801. Bibcode:2011PhRvL.106v6801W. PMID 21702622. arXiv:1103.2226 . doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.226801.
Welker, J.; Giessibl, F. J. (26 April 2012). "Revealing the Angular Symmetry of Chemical Bonds by Atomic Force Microscopy". Science. 336 (6080): 444–449. Bibcode:2012Sci...336..444W. PMID 22539715. doi:10.1126/science.1219850.
Giessibl, F. J. (20 June 2013). "Seeing the Reaction". Science. 340 (6139): 1417–1418. Bibcode:2013Sci...340.1417G. doi:10.1126/science.1239961.
Weymouth, A. J.; Hofmann, T.; Giessibl, F. J. (6 February 2014). "Quantifying Molecular Stiffness and Interaction with Lateral Force Microscopy". Science. 343 (6175): 1120–1122. Bibcode:2014Sci...343.1120W. PMID 24505131. doi:10.1126/science.1249502.
Emmrich, M.; et al. (19 March 2015). "Subatomic resolution force microscopy reveals internal structure and adsorption sites of small iron clusters". Science. 348 (6232): 303–307. Bibcode:2015Sci...348..308E. PMID 25791086. doi:10.1126/science.aaa5329.
Awards and honors
1994: R&D 100 Award (together with Brian Trafas)
2000: Deutscher Nanowissenschaftspreis
2001: Rudolf-Kaiser-Preis
2009: Karl Heinz Beckurts-Preis
2010: Ehrenfest Kolloquium Leiden (Netherlands)
2013: Zernike Kolloquium Groningen (Netherlands)
2014: Joseph F. Keithley Award for Advances in Measurement Science of the American Physical Society
2015: Rudolf-Jaeckel Prize of the German Vacuum Society
2016: Foresight Institute Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology
Presentation at California Nanosystems Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, October 14, 2014
Colloquium at Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, October 6, 2016
Interview about beginnings, now and future of nanotechnology by the British Journal Nanotechnology with Professors James Gimzewski and Christoph Gerber
Podcast by Franziska Konitzer from Welt der Physik with Giessibl about friction (in German)
Podcast with Reviews of Scientific Instruments about advances in atomic force microscopy
Interview with nanotech.org about 30 years of atomic force microscopy
