Christian Schönenberger

In 1999 he published three of his most-cited and most impactful papers that report key experiments in nanoelectronics. He demonstrated electronic quantum interference by measuring the Aharonov–Bohm effect in multi-walled carbon nanotubes and by realizing the quantum optical Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect for the first time with electrons and demonstrated the anti-bunching effects arising from their fermionic statistics and he demonstrated electron transport through DNA molecules.

He then joined the Philips Research Laboratories at Eindhoven in the Netherlands as a postdoctoral fellow and later as a permanent staff member. In 1995 he was appointed full professor (of experimental physics) at the University of Basel, where he heads the Nanoelectronics Group and is currently directing the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the Swiss-NSF center on Nanoscale Science and Technology.

Schönenberger studied electrical engineering and obtained his degree in 1979. While working as an engineer in a research lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, he became interested in natural science and studied physics, obtaining his diploma from the institute in 1986. As a graduate student, he worked under the supervision of Heinrich Rohrer (Nobel laureate in 1986) and S. Alvarado at the IBM Research Laboratory at Rüschlikon and received his PhD in physics with a thesis on magnetic force microscopy in 1990.

Christian Schönenberger (born 5 July 1956 in Zürich) is a Swiss experimental physicist and professor at the University of Basel working on nanoscience and nanoelectronics.