Ivar Giaever (born 5.04.1929) is an experimental physicist and engineer. He was born in Bergen (Norway). He graduated from the Trondheim Institute of Technology (1952). Since 1954 he has worked at the General Electric Company (in 1954—56 in Canada, from 1956 in New York).
His research is in the field of solid-state physics, superconductivity, tunnelling, heat transfer and ion microscopy. In 1960 he made the first observations of the tunnel effect in superconductors, in which electrons tunnelled from one superconductor into another, thereby proving that the energy gap exists; he found out how it affects the tunnel current and studied how the energy gap depends on various parameters. He measured tunnel characteristics at low temperatures and gave a heuristic formula for calculating the tunnel current. He was the first to consider the possibility of using the tunnel effect to measure temperature. In 1965 he detected the radiation of one tunnel junction by means of another (the non-stationary Josephson effect).
Nobel Prize (1973). A member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (1974).