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 of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a visiting professor at University of Maryland, College Park from fall 2015 to spring 2016. Some of Giessibl's experimental and simulated images inspired the offset print editions Erster Blick and Graphit by visual artist Gerhard Richter. Franz Giessibl is married and has two sons.
Scientific contributions
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 and Christoph Gerber . 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 .
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 .
1996: Invented the qPlus sensor, a self sensing AFM quartz sensor that is self sensing, highly stable in frequency and stiff enough to allow sub-Angstrom oscillation amplitudes.
1997: Introduces a formula that connects frequency shifts and forces for large amplitudes .
2000: Obtains atomic spatial resolution using qPlus sensor.
2000: Observes subatomic resolution on tip features .
2001: Invents an algorithm to deconvolute forces from frequency shifts.
2003: Obtaines atomically resolved lateral force microscopy
2004: Achieves sub-Angstrom resolution on tip features using a qPlus sensor in a low temperature AFM using higher harmonic force microscopy
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 ] and single-electron charges on single gold atoms
2012: Introduces carbon monoxide front atom identification, a method for the atomic and subatomic characterization of scanning probe tips
2013: Observes evidence for superexchange interaction and very low noise data of exchange interactions between CoSm tips and antiferromagnetic NiO
2013: Observes atomic resolution in ambient conditions without special sample preparation
2014: Measurement of CO-CO interactions by lateral force microscopy
2015: Atomic resolution of few atom metal clusters and subatomic resolution of single metal atoms
2016: Simultaneous inelastic tunneling spectroscopy and AFM , AFM with superconductive tips , Multifrequency AFM using bimodal qPlus sensors.
2018: Simultaneous inelastic tunneling spectroscopy and AFM shows bond weakening effect.
2018: Joint study with John Sader group on well- and ill posed force deconvolution schemes.
2019: Review article about qPlus sensors and applications.
2019: Observation of transition from physisorption to chemisorption, subatomic resolution of single Fe and Cu atoms in experiment and DFT.
