German physicist
Franz Josef Gießibl (born 27 May 1962 in Amerang) is a German physicist and university professor at the University of Regensburg.
Life.
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 &amp; 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 2005, he obtained offers for a chair at the University of Bristol (England) and University of Regensburg (Germany). 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 (CNST) 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" (2000) and "Graphit" (2004) by visual artist Gerhard Richter.
Franz Giessibl is married and has two sons.
Scientific contributions.
Giessibl established atomic force microscopy as a surface science tool with atomic resolution, launching the field of Non-contact atomic force microscopy. Together with his team, he even obtained subatomic spatial resolution "(F.J. Giessibl, S. Hembacher, H. Bielefeldt, J. Mannhart, Science 2000)", 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 more than 500 commercial and homebuilt atomic force microscopes around the world.
References.
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