Both of his parents’ families had lived in the area for generations, so it was something of a shock when Störmer eventually went abroad to study for his doctorate. As a child, Störmer spent much of his time playing with his cousins, and he built cardboard planes and ships from kits when he was on his own. From the age of ten he went to the Goethe-Gymnasium in the next town, where he struggled in German and foreign languages, but he enjoyed mathematics and science and did well at sport.

He fed his love of physics by going to more challenging after-school courses run by his teacher, and by constructing telephones and light boxes to communicate with his cousins at home. Störmer also made explosives and rockets at home, with mixed results. He succeeded in launching a souped-up toy train’s carriage into the air several times, but it later exploded in his hand, costing him half of his right thumb, an affliction that excused him from army duty.

Störmer passed his Baccalaureate with average grades, and while achieving straight As in his final mathematics and physics exams at the Goethe University in Frankfurt he failed chemistry. Through the generosity of his tutors, he had to retake only the chemistry exam, and during this 6-month period of intensive study he began to enjoy this subject.

For his doctorate, Störmer left the familiar surroundings of home for Grenoble, France, where the Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart was operating a high-magnetic field facility together with the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). According to Störmer, going to Grenoble was the single most important step in his life; as well as the excitement of experiencing a new culture and language, he met both his future wife, Dominique Parchet, and Daniel Tsui, with whom he would share the Nobel Prize.

In June 1977, Störmer moved to the United States to work for Bell Laboratories, then the research arm of AT&T, and he was given a permanent position a year later. In the early 1980s, he and Tsui, now also at Bell Labs, were working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) High Magnetic Field Laboratory when they discovered an interesting variation of Klaus von Klitzing’s quantum Hall effect (for which he had received the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics).

Von Klitzing discovered that at low temperatures the manner in which strong magnetic fields affect electrical resistance along a semiconductor (where electrons can only move along a two-dimensional surface) is not smooth and continuous — resistance varies in the form of a series of steps, which correspond to quantum states of electrons. Using a new gallium arsenide-based semiconductor at even lower temperatures and stronger magnetic fields, Störmer and Tsui discovered smaller, more frequent steps in resistance, the sizes of which suggested the electrons carried a third of a charge. Tsui initially thought that they had discovered quarks, but Robert Laughlin explained that under these conditions the electrons form a quantum fluid made up of quasi-particles that have fractional electric charges, hence the term fractional quantum Hall effect.

Störmer remained at Bell Labs until 1997, as head of the Electronic and Optical Properties of Solids department (from 1983) and director of the Physical Research Laboratory (from 1991), joining Columbia University as Professor of Physics and Applied Physics in 1998. He still works part-time with Bell Labs, now part of Lucent Technologies, and holds eight patents.

Nobel Prize in Physics 1998
Horst Störmer’s Nobel Lecture