Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics 

The Kirchhoff Institute for Physics (KIP) is named after a prominent physicist of the 19th Century: Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, who worked 21 years in Heidelberg. His well-known lectures on experimental and theoretical physics attracted many students. Kirchhoff's theoretical and experimental investigations are extraordinarily diverse, they include electrical, magnetic, optical, elastic, hydrodynamic and thermal processes. His laws to the junction of streams are known well. At the time he was in Heidelberg his discovery of spectral analysis coincides with Robert Wilhelm Bunsen and its application to solar radiation. This way, Kirchhoff founded the astrophysics, as well as the formulation of the radiation law, which was the gate for quantum physics. The KIP feels obliged to this versatility.