Daniel Chee Tsui
active c. 1939, Fan County, Henan, China
Chinese-American physicist who co-discovered the fractional quantum Hall effect with Horst Störmer.
Born into a rural family in Henan, China, Tsui studied in Hong Kong before moving to the United States for Augustana College, then earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1967. He joined Bell Labs in 1968, where he spent most of his career.
In 1982 he and Horst Störmer published the discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect in a two-dimensional electron system — later explained by Laughlin's wavefunction. He received the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics and was professor of physics at Princeton from 1982.
Nobel-winning work
Together with Horst Störmer at Bell Labs, Tsui performed magnetotransport measurements on the two-dimensional electron gas in GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures at extreme magnetic fields and very low temperatures. They found the Hall resistance quantized at ν = 1/3 and other odd-denominator fractions — an effect inexplicable by the single-electron picture underlying the integer quantum Hall effect.
The 1982 discovery opened the fractional quantum Hall effect: strongly interacting electrons form an incompressible quantum liquid, which Robert Laughlin described with his famous wavefunction featuring fractionally charged quasiparticles. The three shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics 'for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations'.
Workplaces: Bell Labs, Princeton University
China, United States