Nobel-winning Swiss physicist Muller dies at 95

GENEVA: Swiss physicist Karl Alex Muller, who won the Nobel Physics Prize in 1987 along with his German colleague Georg Bednorz for their discovery of the first high-temperature superconductor, has died.

Muller, who was 95, died on January 9, according to a death notice published in the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper by his family and the IBM Research laboratory. The scientist died peacefully in his sleep, after facing the final chapter of life with ‘‘perseverance and optimism’’, they wrote.

Muller and Bednorz were researchers at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory when they jointly won the world’s top physics prize more than 35 years ago. They were honoured “for their important breakthrough in the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials.”