. After completing his Dr. rer. nat., he became an assistant professor at the University of Campinas in 1976 and Free University of Berlin the following year. Upon completing his
habilitation in 1982, he worked as a senior scientist under Yves Baer at the University of Neuchâtel. This is where Schneider began his work on high-resolution photoemission which led to the discovery of the
Kondo resonance in
Ce and in Ce heavy
fermion compounds. This finding established a relation between ground state properties (
resistivity, magnetism, specific heat) and high-energy spectroscopies of condensed matter. Later research included the discovery of the superconducting energy gap by photoemission techniques in a high-temperature superconductor. He became a full professor at
University of Lausanne in 1989 and later at
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His research lab, Laboratoire de Physique des Surfaces (Laboratory of Physics at Surfaces) was founded in 1989 and research activity ceased upon his retirement in 2009. The focus of their research was the "structural, electronic, magnetic, and optical properties of supported nanostructures." His research group detected STM-induced light emission from adsorbed
C60 molecules at molecular resolution which was a step towards optical recognition and chemical identification of individual molecules at surfaces. They later used the technique to achieve local
phosphorescence and
fluorescence from
fullerene molecules which enabled chemical recognition at the molecular scale. His group was among the first to detect the Kondo effect at the atomic scale, which aided efforts to exploit
nanomagnetism. As Louis Pasteur used a light microscope to guide his tweezers to separate sodium ammonium tartrate crystals in 1848, Schneider's research group used a
scanning tunneling microscope to both image and separate chiral
decameric clusters of
1-Nitronaphthalene. The experiments expanded
nanochemistry with the ability to separate
enantiomers. They also contributed to the development of
nanocatalysis by discovering atom-by-atom size-dependence of CO oxidation on deposited Au nanoclusters. While inert in larger quantities, nanoscale gold particles dispersed on oxide supports exhibit notable catalytic activity. As electronics become smaller, understanding the behavior of ultrathin insulating layers increases in importance. His group pioneered the investigation of the electronic structure of insulators towards the ultrathin limit and found that three monolayers are sufficient to establish the electronic characteristics of the surface of a MgO-single crystal. The results suggest that the number of dielectric monolayers deposited on a metal substrate, the electronic, magnetic and chemical properties of the resulting surface could be tuned in a controlled manner. His research group also aided in the understanding of the progression of chirality self-assembling from molecules to larger, supermolecular structures. Due to electrostatic interactions,
rubrene would spontaneously create intricate homochiral architectures while ensuring only molecules of the same chirality assembled together. Schneider has served both on the international advisory committee of the International Symposium on Atomic Level Characterization and the international scientific committee of the Symposium on Surface Science for a number of years. ==Editorial boards==