He died on January 9, according to the death notice published in the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper by his relatives and his research laboratory IBM Research, reports the Swiss news agency ATS.
The researcher, born in Basel and who notably taught at the University of Zurich, fell asleep peacefully after supporting his last slice of life with "perseverance and optimism", writes the family.
Karl Alex Müller had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 with the German Georg Bednorz, with whom he worked at the Zurich research laboratory IBM Research, "for their important breakthrough in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials". .
One of the most spectacular phenomena in physics, superconductivity - the ability to perfectly conduct electric current without any resistance - has been known since 1911 when Dutch physicist Heile Kammerlingh-Omnes discovered that a strand of mercury, cooled in the liquid helium, conducted the current infinitely better at about -270°C.
Initially limited to temperatures below -250°C, superconductivity gained new momentum with the discovery, in 1986, by Karl Alex Müller and Georg Bednorz, of new materials, copper oxides or cuprates, superconductors at -238 °C.
It is this progress that will earn them, only a year later, the Nobel Prize.
"1986 was an exciting year for science in Zurich. It all started with a seemingly far-fetched idea that K. Alex Müller, then an IBM researcher and professor at the University of Zurich, had at a conference in Sicily", said the University of Zurich on its online site on Tuesday after the announcement of his death.
Superconductivity has many applications today: trains in magnetic levitation, MRI imaging, particle accelerators, power plants, etc.
Since the discovery of 1986, other researchers have developed an alloy which becomes superconducting from -140°C, the highest temperature to date, underlines the University of Zurich.
These higher temperatures have the great advantage that superconductivity can be achieved by cooling with liquid nitrogen rather than liquid helium, which makes technical applications much simpler and less expensive, she said. precise.
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