[1][2] Together they showed with this method that not only elementary particles like electrons have wave properties (previously shown by the Davisson–Germer experiment), but also molecules like the hydrogen atom and helium.

[6][2] A second work paper which was later cited in the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Stern, was the measurement, in collaboration with Otto Robert Frisch, of the magnetic moment of the proton in 1933.

In 1933, Stern quit the University of Hamburg before being fired and received an invitation to work at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, United States.

[8] During World War II, Estermann worked on radar and later was transferred to the Manhattan Project, US secret program that produced the first atomic bomb.

[9][5] After Stern retired and moved to University of California, Berkeley in 1950, Estermann went to work to the Office of Naval Research,[7] initially as a consultant and head of the materials science department, and from 1959 as its scientific director in London.