Horst Ludwig Störmer

Who is Horst Ludwig Störmer?

Horst Ludwig Störmer is a German physicist who shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics with Daniel Tsui and Robert Laughlin. The three shared the prize "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations". He and Tsui were working at Bell Labs at the time of the experiment cited by the Nobel committee, though the experiment itself was carried out in a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Störmer studied physics at the J.W. Goethe-Universität at Frankfurt am Main and completed a PhD at the University of Stuttgart in 1977. 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. 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.

Stormer is a naturalized US citizen.