Department of Physics

On 26 April 2024, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Klaus Dransfeld at the age of 97. He was Professor of Experimental Physics at our department from 1982 until his retirement in 1994.

Klaus Dransfeld was born in Berlin on 12 August 1926. In 1947, he began studying physics, chemistry and mathematics at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn, graduating in 1952 with a doctorate on the scattering of light by sound waves under Prof Clemens Schäfer. After two years as a university assistant in Cologne, he went to the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University as a post-doctoral researcher, and two years later as a scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, USA. There he achieved sensational results on the generation of high-frequency ultrasound with microwaves, which led to an appointment to an associate professorship at the University of California in Berkeley.

In 1965, Klaus Dransfeld accepted an appointment as a full professor at the Technical University of Munich. There, together with other returnees from the USA such as Rudolf Mößbauer, Wolfgang Kaiser and Edgar Lüscher, he carried out pioneering work in establishing the newly founded Department of Physics. One of the most important areas of work in Munich was the development of acoustic surface waves, which can be used to build sharply separating acoustic filters that are now part of every television set and mobile phone. A second, equally important field of work in Munich was the investigation of the elastic and thermal properties of glasses at low temperatures.

Klaus Dransfeld's next professional station was Grenoble, where a Franco-German high-field magnetic laboratory was being set up. He became its first German director and, in a remarkably short time, succeeded in establishing this institute, which is now one of the world's leading research centres in this field. After four years, Klaus Dransfeld returned to Germany, where he worked from 1977 to 1981 as Director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, where his group investigated the nature of elementary excitations in glasses as well as piezoelectric polymers and electrically conductive plastics.

Despite the excellent conditions at the Max Planck Institute, Klaus Dransfeld decided to return to academia in 1981 and accept an appointment at the University of Constance. In addition to his broad spectrum of fields of work, Klaus Dransfeld added the recently invented scanning probe microscopy, which he developed further in an original and visionary way.

Physics in Konstanz is also particularly grateful to him because he launched a major joint project: the Collaborative Research Centre "Processes of Atomic and Molecular Motion" of the German Research Foundation, which was the start of four successive Collaborative Research Centres at the Department of Physics.

Klaus Dransfeld was an outstanding researcher and academic teacher who inspired and influenced generations of physicists through his scientific creativity, unconventional approaches, generosity and integrity. He was also a warm-hearted and highly esteemed colleague who was committed to the interests of science and the promotion of younger scientists in many different ways, and who participated in the scientific life of our department even in his old age. The Department of Physics and the University of Konstanz will honour his memory.

Paul Leiderer