Peter Grütter

Peter Grütter is the Director of CIFAR's Nanoelectronics Program, Professor of Physics at McGill University and Research Director of NSERC’s Nano Innovation Platform.  After spending his childhood in Chile, South Africa and Switzerland, he graduated with a Diploma in Experimental Physics (1986) and Ph.D. (summa cum laude, 1989) from the University of Basel, Switzerland.  He held post-doctoral fellowships at the IBM Almaden Research Lab and the University of Basel, then worked as a Visiting Scientist in the IBM Zurich Research Lab.  In 1994, Dr. Grütter joined McGill University's Physics Department, where he now heads a research group in scanning probe microscopy and nanotechnology.

In December 2000, Dr. Grütter was named one of McGill University’s first William Dawson Scholars, part of a program designed to be a parallel counterpart to the federal Canada Research Chairs program.  In 2001, he received a Steacie Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and in 2002 he was recognized as one of Canada’s top scientific researchers under the age of 40 through CIFAR’s Young Explorers Award.  In 2005, Dr. Grütter was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he received the Rutherford Memorial Medal in Physics from the Royal Society of Canada, and he was awarded the Carrie Derick Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Supervision from McGill University. In 2006, he was named a James McGill Professor and, in 2007, received the Millennium Award from the Assoc. Chambers of Commerce & Industry of India.  Recent winners of this award include Sir Harold Kroto (2007) and Craig Venter (2006).

Dr. Grütter describes his research interests as follows:

My research interests are focussed on scanning probe microscopy and the interdisciplinary application of these techniques.  At the nanometer level, the traditional boundaries between physics, chemistry, engineering and the life sciences vanish.  Physics, and in particular a background in scanning probe techniques, is an excellent basis to contribute significantly to the emerging field of nanotechnology.

Together with my group, I try to push the limits of instrumentation.  I want to build and operate instruments at the absolute limits given by nature – this challenges creativity, physical insight and technological wizardry.  As an example, we are in the process of building an instrument that would allow us to directly detect the spin of a single proton.  This would allow very interesting experiments in the field of quantum measurements and, on the other end of the spectrum, would also open the door to the direct structure determination of complex organic molecules by performing NMR with single atomic resolution and sensitivity.

As an example of a multidisciplinary project, we are developing an optical microscope with 50 nm resolution to study enzymes on life cell membranes or the topochemistry of wood pulping in collaborations with chemists and biochemists.  Other projects, such as the application of scanning probe techniques to study magnetic phenomena, the role of lubricants on a molecular scale or the determination of the conductivity and mechanical strength of a single atom contact in a dedicated ultra-high vacuum surface science system are described in more detail on the WWW at: Grütter Research Group