Horst Stormer

Today is the birthday of physicist Horst Störmer, born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1949. In school he excelled at math and science but just scraped by in German, English, and French classes. He lost half of his right thumb when a rocket he was working on exploded in his hand. Störmer earned a PhD in physics from the University of Stuttgart in Germany and then joined Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. In 1982 Störmer and colleague Daniel Tsui were studying a phenomenon called the Hall effect in extremely low-temperature semiconductors exposed to powerful magnetic fields. To the scientists’ surprise, measurements of the current implied that it was made up of fractional units of an electron’s charge. The following year Robert Laughlin explained this odd phenomenon: The semiconductor had morphed into a quantum fluid made up of “quasiparticles” arising from the interaction of electrons. Störmer, Tsui, and Laughlin shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery and explanation of what’s called the fractional quantum Hall effect. (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)

Date in History: 6 April 1949