Giaever, Ivar (1929– )

Norwegian-born US physicist who worked on tunnelling (the flow of an electric current through a thin film of insulating material sandwiched between two metal plates when a voltage is applied to the plates) and superconductivity. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973 with Brian Josephson and Leo Esaki for their work on the tunnelling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors.

Giaever investigated the tunnelling effects previously observed by Esaki. In 1960 he found that if one of the metal plates was in a superconducting state, the behaviour of the electric current when the voltage was varied revealed much about the superconducting state. This discovery was instrumental in Josephson's discovery of the Josephson effect (the flow of electrons across an insulating film between two superconducting materials).

Giaever was born in Bergen, Norway, and studied electrical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology. He emigrated to Canada in 1954 and moved to the USA in 1957. He joined the General Electric research laboratory in Schenectady, New York, in 1958. In 1964 he gained his doctorate from the New York Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute.