Hans-Joachim Queisser

Who is Hans-Joachim Queisser?

Hans-Joachim Queisser is a solid-state physicist. He is best known for co-authoring the 1961 work on solar cells that detailed what is today known as the Shockley-Queisser limit, which is now considered the key contribution in this field.

Queisser's father was a mechanical engineer for Siemens. In 1928 he travelled to the United States to work on power plants, and asked his fiancé to join him. She wanted to return to Germany, and Hans Joachim was born shortly after their return in 1931, in Berlin. He was in Dresden during the air raid in 1945, and states he survived "barely". His father was sent to the Soviet Union after the war, and Queisser wanted to enter the University of Berlin through an apprenticeship program and working as a technician at a research institute in Berlin. However, he instead applied for a scholarship in the United States, and was accepted to the University of Kansas for 1951 and 1952. He returned to Germany and obtained his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Göttingen in 1958.