Klaus von Klitzing
Klaus von Klitzing is a German physicist known for discovering the integer quantum Hall effect, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1985. He was born on 28 June 1943 in Schroda (now Środa Wielkopolska, Poland). He finished high school in 1962 and studied physics at the Braunschweig University of Technology, earning his diploma in 1969. He earned his PhD in 1972 at the University of Würzburg, with a thesis on galvanomagnetic properties of tellurium in strong magnetic fields, and he completed his habilitation in 1978.
He worked at Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory and at the Grenoble High Magnetic Field Laboratory in France before becoming a professor at the Technical University of Munich in 1980. Since 1985 he has been director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart.
The von Klitzing constant RK = h/e^2 is named after him. Its value is about 25,812.807 ohms, and its inverse 1/RK = e^2/h is half the conductance quantum (2e^2/h).
His research focuses on the properties of electrons in very small, low-temperature systems in strong magnetic fields. He has received several honors, including the UNSW Dirac Medal in 1988 and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2003.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 07:36 (CET).