In 1961, became an ordentlicher Professor (professor ordinarius) of technical physics at the Technische Hochschule München. Also in 1961, Rudolf L. Mößbauer, a former student of Maier-Leibnitz at Technische Hochschule München, received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of recoil-free emission and absorption of gamma radiation in solids known as the Mößbauer Effect, which led to numerous applications in solid state physics, chemistry, biophysics, medicine and archeology. Maier-Leibnitz, along with his colleagues Wilhelm Brenig, Nikolaus Riehl and Wolfgang Wild, in a memorandum in 1962, proposed the establishment of a Physics Department at the Technische Hochschule München. This was used as bargaining tool to bring Mößbauer from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena back to the Technische Hochschule München in 1964. The Physics Department was founded on 1 January 1965, replacing the three former independent institutes, but now with ten full professors, one of which was Maier-Leibnitz; the three institutes replaced were the Physikalisches Institut, the 'Laboratorium für technische Physik, and the Institut für Theoretische Physik.