Horst Ludwig Störmer
active c. 1949, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
German physicist who co-discovered the fractional quantum Hall effect at Bell Labs with Daniel Tsui.
Born in Frankfurt, Störmer studied in Darmstadt and earned his PhD at the University of Stuttgart in 1977 on electron spectroscopy of solids, then moved to Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he grew semiconductor heterostructures of unprecedented purity — the key to his later discovery.
In October 1981, during measurements at the Francis Bitter National Magnet Laboratory (MIT), he and Daniel Tsui observed a quantized Hall plateau at filling factor ν = 1/3 — the fractional quantum Hall effect, published in 1982. He shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics with Tsui and Laughlin, and joined Columbia University as professor the same year.
Nobel-winning work
At Bell Labs, Störmer developed GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure samples with record electron mobility — then the 'cleanest' two-dimensional electron systems in the world. With Daniel Tsui, using samples grown by Arthur Gossard, he measured Hall resistance in fields up to 30 tesla at millikelvin temperatures.
Published in 1982, the results showed Hall resistance plateaus at fractional filling factors ν = 1/3 (and later 2/5, 3/7,… with odd denominators) accompanied by vanishing longitudinal resistance — the fractional quantum Hall effect. It was the first sign of a strongly correlated quantum liquid, theorized by Laughlin's wavefunction with fractionally charged quasiparticles — 'a new form of quantum fluid' in the Nobel committee's words.
Workplaces: Bell Labs, Columbia University
Germany, United States