Horst Ludwig Störmer

Horst Ludwig Störmer

Horst Ludwig Störmer
Born (1949-04-06) April 6, 1949
Frankfurt, Germany
Nationality United States
Fields Physics
Institutions

Columbia University

Bell Labs
Alma mater

University of Stuttgart

Goethe University Frankfurt
Known for Fractional quantum Hall effect
Notable awards Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (1984)
Nobel Prize in Physics (1998)
The Benjamin Franklin Medal (1998)

Horst Ludwig Störmer (born April 6, 1949) is a German-born American physicist, Nobel laureate and emeritus professor at Columbia University.[1] He was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Daniel Tsui and Robert Laughlin "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations" (the fractional quantum Hall effect).[2] He and Tsui were working at Bell Labs at the time of the experiment cited by the Nobel committee.

Biography

Störmer was born in Frankfurt am Main, and grew up in the nearby town of Sprendlingen. He studied physics at the J.W. Goethe-Universität at Frankfurt am Main, qualifying for his Diploma in the laboratory of Prof. Werner Martienssen. Here he was supervised by Prof. Eckhardt Hoenig, and worked alongside another future Nobel laureate, Gerd Binnig.[3]

Störmer moved to France to carry out his PhD research in Grenoble, working in a high-magnetic field laboratory which was run jointly between the French CNRS and the German Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Störmer's academic advisory was Prof. Hans-Joachim Queisser, and he was awarded a PhD by the University of Stuttgart in 1977 for his thesis on investigations of electron hole droplets subject to high magnetic fields. He also met his wife, Dominique Parchet, while working in Grenoble.[3]

After receiving his PhD, Störmer moved to the USA to work at Bell Labs, where he carried out the research that led to his Nobel prize.[3] After working at Bell Labs for 20 years, he became the I.I. Rabi professor of physics and applied physics at Columbia University in New York City, and is now an emeritus professor.[1]

Störmer is a naturalized US citizen.[4]

Research career

Perhaps as important as the work for which he won the Nobel prize is his invention of modulation doping, a method for making extremely high mobility two dimensional electron systems in semiconductors. This enabled the later observation of the fractional quantum Hall effect, which was discovered by Störmer and Tsui in October 1981 in an experiment carried out in the Francis Bitter High Magnetic Field Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Within a year of the experimental discovery, Robert Laughlin was able to explain its results. Störmer, Tsui and Laughlin were jointly awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.[5]

References

  1. 1 2 Home page at Columbia
  2. ↑ Stormer, HL; Tsui, DC (1983), "The Quantized Hall Effect.", Science (published Jun 17, 1983), 220 (4603), pp. 1241–1246, Bibcode:1983Sci...220.1241S, doi:10.1126/science.220.4603.1241, PMID 17769353
  3. 1 2 3 Nobel autobiography
  4. ↑ http://www.nndb.com/people/075/000099775/
  5. ↑ Nobel Prize press release

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Horst Ludwig Störmer
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/6/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.