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Vol. 24, No. 6 Oct. 16, 1998

Professor Horst Stormer Shares 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics

By Bob Nelson

Horst Stormer, professor of physics and applied physics at Columbia and adjunct director of physical sciences at Bell Laboratories, a unit of Lucent Technologies Corp., in Murray Hill, N.J., will share the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of bizarre motions of electrons in thin layers of semiconductors.

Stormer, a resident of Manhattan who teaches an undergraduate course this term at Columbia, was honored with Daniel Tsui, a professor at Princeton, for discovering a phenomenon known as the fractional quantum Hall effect, and with Robert B. Laughlin, a professor at Stanford, for restating the theoretical explanation of this achievement as a simple equation.

Such basic research may eventually help create improved electronic devices such as computer chips or optoelectronic devices such as solid-state lasers. These structures, only a few hundred atoms across, are of immense technological importance because they will be capable of faster switching speeds and can be used to construct higher-density computer memories than is now possible.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited the trio "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations." They will share the $978,000 prize to be presented Dec. 10 in Stockholm.

Stormer holds joint appointments in Columbia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.

The award marks the 58th Nobel to a former or current Columbia faculty member or alumnus, and the fourth at the Fu Foundation School. Five Nobelists are currently on Columbia's faculty, four of them in physics.

"Everyone at Columbia is of course thrilled to hear that the Nobel committee has recognized Horst Stormer's magnificent achievement," said President George Rupp. "It is certainly satisfying that such elegant basic science receives the acclaim it deserves."

Stormer and Tsui discovered the fractional quantum Hall effect in 1982. The phenomenon occurs in a thin sheet of electrons inside a semiconductor, not unlike the electron sheet in a modern-day transistor. At temperatures that approach absolute zero and in strong magnetic fields, the electron appears to break up into three identical pieces, each with a fractional charge. However, this perplexing event takes place not because the electron disintegrates, but because the motion of many electrons together generate bizarre particles in their midst. Such electrons can be made to travel as waves in quantum wires, and can be bound into new, artificial atoms called quantum dots. They can even enter superfluid states where they seem to move without friction or resistance.

Within a year, Laughlin succeeded in explaining their result, showing that electrons in powerful magnetic fields can condense to form quantum fluids, related to the superfluids that occur in superconductors and liquid helium. The discovery has opened up a new realm of scientific inquiry, the Nobel committee said, because "events in a drop of quantum fluid can afford more profound insights into the inner structure and dynamics of matter."

Stormer, born in Frankfurt in 1949, earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Stuttgart in 1977, and in that year joined AT&T Bell Laboratories. He accepted a joint appointment in Columbia's Department of Physics and the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics effective Jan. 1.

He won the American Physical Society's prestigious Oliver E. Buckley Prize in Condensed Matter Physics in 1984. He was awarded the Franklin Institute Medal in Physics with Dr. Tsui and Dr. Laughlin, for the same work that won the Nobel, on April 30 in Philadelphia. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.