He is best known for co-authoring the 1961 work on solar cells that detailed what is today known as the Shockley–Queisser limit, now considered the key contribution in this field.

He returned to Germany and obtained his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Göttingen in 1958 under the supervision of Rudolf Hilsch.

[2] After graduating in Göttingen, Queisser accepted a job at the Shockley Transistor Corporation in Mountain View, California, where he worked on crystal growth, epitaxy, diffusion, lattice defects, junction properties and solar cells.

[3] He and his co-worker Richard Finch identified oxygen-induced stacking faults and achieved the first transmission electron microscopy on semiconductors with J. Washburn and G. Thomas at UC Berkeley.

In 1970, he became a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research at Stuttgart.