Horst Ludwig Störmer Biography

Horst Ludwig Störmer is a German-born American physicist who was one of the co-recipients of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contribution to the discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations. He spent several years working at Bell Labs with another prominent scientist, Daniel Tsui, with whom he conducted the experiments on the quantum Hall effect. Born into a middle-class, close-knit family in Germany, he grew up building castles and other structures as a child which demonstrated his early aptitude for both physics and architecture. After completing his schooling, he decided to study architecture but changed his mind mid-way and shifted to mathematics and physics. After graduating from the University of Frankfurt he proceeded to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Stuttgart after completing his doctoral work under Prof. Hans-Joachim Queisser. He soon moved to the United States to take up a job at the Bell Labs, the research arm of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). It was here that he became acquainted with Daniel Tsui, an expert on two-dimensional electron systems in silicon. The two men collaborated to perform important research on the quantum Hall effect which eventually led to the discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect.