Rainer Waser – A Short Bio Note

Rainer Waser is a physical chemist. Throughout his life, he has worked at the frontiers among several disciplines from natural to engineering sciences by pursuing the search for fundamental understanding of certain phenomena, shaping the technology of our current world. Since the early age he has always shown a singular aptitude for scientific disciplines, and his life has been characterized by outstanding achievements and granted awards in many fields.

After a pre-doctoral stay in the Electrochemistry Group of the University of Southampton, he has successfully accomplished his doctorate in electrochemistry at the TH Darmstadt under the supervision of prof Konrad Weil setting up a complete computer-controlled measuring station – from the circuit design to the circuit board production to the measuring programs in Z80 assembler.

After his doctorate in 1984, he went to the Philips research laboratory in Aachen to investigate the causes of long-term degradation of the insulation resistance in perovskite ceramics under DC voltage and temperature stress in the electronic ceramics group. He succeeded in elucidating the phenomenon of long-term degradation as an ion transport process that leads to the formation of a pn junction in a dielectric. For this work, together with Prof. Härdtl at the University of Karlsruhe and his PhD student, Tudor Baiatu, he received the American Ceramic Society award from for the best paper of the decade furthermore was also rewarded ranking second in the European finals in the Philips European Contest for Young Scientists and Inventors with a scientific-theoretical paper on the sociology of music during his chemistry studies.

After his appointment to the Institute of Materials in Electrical Engineering (IWE-2) at RWTH Aachen University in 1992, Rainer Waser initially worked in the areas of dielectric and ferroelectric materials and was invited to join the large DARPA project on high-epsilon materials for DRAMs as the only non-U.S citizen participant. He has therefore also received an award from the IEEE in 2000 for working in these areas.

In 1997, Rainer Waser took over the management of the currently named “Institute for Electronic Materials” (PGI-7) at Forschungszentrum Jülich. In 2001 was appointed to lead the organization of the IFF Spring School named “New Materials in Information Technology” being also the title of his well-known textbook “Nanoelectronics and Information Technology”. He always has directed his research group on promising resistive switching in the following years. Through a first publication in 2006^[1] and especially his publication together with Masakazu Aono in 2007,^[2] he established an explanation for resistive switching, which has been known since the 1960s. He was able to show that an oxygen ion movement and a coupled electrochemical redox process on the nanometre scale in the crystal lattice of the oxides is responsible for the switching property.

Together with Matthias Wuttig, he succeeded in acquiring the SFB 917 “Nanoswitches”, in which redox-based and phase-change-based switching has been studied since 2011. Rainer Waser's work was awarded the DFG's prestigious Leibniz Prize in 2014. On the occasion of the 60th birthdays of the IWE and himself, he organised a symposium “Crossing Borders and the Craziness in Science” in September 2015 – as well as a costume party “60 Years of Craziness” at Kasteel Vaalsbroek, inspired by the Tomorrowland festival in Belgium.

During a sabbatical period, at Stanford University in 2016, which indeed it turned a very fruitful year, Rainer Waser and his collaborators acquired the structural change project “NEUROTEC – Neuro-inspired artificial intelligence technologies for the electronics of the future in the Rhenish Revier” in 2019. Together with neighbouring institutes at FZJ and RWTH and selected industrial companies in the region, the project is concerned with researching and developing the basic technologies for neuromorphic computing based on resistive/memristive devices and other alternative concepts to conventional von Neumann computing technology.

Rainer Waser has always relied on a strong group of scientists from different disciplines, each driven by the will to achieve goals together. He has certainly achieved this interdisciplinary ideal state to a very large extent and this explains the success of our working group.

中文翻译：

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Rainer Waser – 电阻开关存储器基础的先驱

Rainer Waser——简短的生物笔记

Rainer Waser 是一位物理化学家。在他的一生中，他一直在从自然科学到工程科学的多个学科的前沿工作，寻求对某些现象的基本理解，塑造我们当前世界的技术。他从小就对科学学科表现出非凡的才能，一生成绩斐然，屡获殊荣。

在南安普顿大学电化学小组进行博士前学习后，他在 Konrad Weil 教授的指导下成功完成了他在达姆施塔特大学的电化学博士学位，并建立了一个完整的计算机控制测量站——从电路设计到电路板生产到Z80组装机中的测量程序。

1984年获得博士学位后，他前往亚琛的飞利浦研究实验室，调查电子陶瓷组在直流电压和温度应力下钙钛矿陶瓷绝缘电阻长期劣化的原因。他成功地阐明了作为离子传输过程的长期退化现象，该过程导致在电介质中形成 pn 结。由于这项工作，他与卡尔斯鲁厄大学的 Härdtl 教授和他的博士生 Tudor Baiatu 一起获得了美国陶瓷学会颁发的十年最佳论文奖，并在飞利浦的欧洲决赛中排名第二欧洲青年科学家和发明家竞赛，他在化学研究期间发表了一篇关于音乐社会学的科学理论论文。

在 1992 年被任命为亚琛工业大学电气工程材料研究所 (IWE-2) 后，Rainer Waser 最初在介电和铁电材料领域工作，并应邀加入 DARPA 的高ε材料大型项目DRAMs 作为唯一的非美国公民参与者。因此，他还在 2000 年获得了 IEEE 颁发的奖项，以表彰他在这些领域的工作。

1997 年，Rainer Waser 接管了 Forschungszentrum Jülich 目前名为“电子材料研究所”（PGI-7）的管理。2001年被任命领导IFF春季学校的组织，命名为“信息技术中的新材料”，也是他著名的教科书“纳米电子与信息技术”的标题。在接下来的几年里，他一直指导他的研究小组致力于电阻式开关。通过 2006 年的首次出版^{[ 1 ]}，尤其是 2007 年他与青野正和一起出版，^{[ 2 ]}他建立了对自 1960 年代以来就为人所知的电阻开关的解释。他能够证明，氧化物晶格中的氧离子运动和纳米尺度上的耦合电化学氧化还原过程是开关特性的原因。

他与 Matthias Wuttig 一起成功获得了 SFB 917“纳米开关”，其中自 2011 年以来一直在研究基于氧化还原和基于相变的开关。Rainer Waser 的工作在 2014 年获得了 DFG 享有盛誉的莱布尼茨奖。在 IWE 和他本人 60 岁生日之际，他于 2015 年 9 月组织了一场“跨越国界与科学中的疯狂”研讨会，并在 Kasteel Vaalsbroek 举办了一场“疯狂的 60 年”化妆舞会，灵感来自比利时的明日世界节.

在 2016 年斯坦福大学的休假期间，这确实是硕果累累的一年，Rainer Waser 和他的合作者获得了结构变革项目“NEUROTEC——莱茵河雷维尔未来电子学的受神经启发的人工智能技术” 2019 年。与 FZJ 和 RWTH 的邻近研究所以及该地区的选定工业公司一起，该项目致力于研究和开发基于电阻/忆阻设备的神经形态计算的基础技术以及传统冯诺依曼计算技术的其他替代概念。

Rainer Waser 一直依赖于一群来自不同学科的强大科学家，每个人都有共同实现目标的意愿。他当然在很大程度上实现了这种跨学科的理想状态，这也解释了我们工作组的成功。