Title: News from the Quantum Hall Effect

Date: June 4, 2008

By: Prof. Klaus v. Klitzing

    Abstract：Basic research on the most important device in microelectronics, a silicon field effect transistor, led in 1980 to the discovery of the Quantum Hall Effect (QHE). Electrical measurements on such a device demonstrated, that a new type of electrical resistor can be realized, a resistor with a well defined value which depends exclusively on fundamental constants. Today, the word QHE is a synonym for the more general topic of electrons in strong magnetic fields which has connections not only to solid state physics but also to other research areas like astrophysics (edge states in gravity and black hole physics), high energy physics (quantum Hall quarks) and metrology (fundamental constants). This broad interest in QHE physics explains the high publication rate of about one publication per day. The presentation will start with a general introduction to the QHE followed by very recent experiments connected with a microscopic picture of current flow in quantum Hall devices and new phenomena in double layer quantum Hall systems which may be related to exciton condensation and superfluidity.

    Klaus von Klitzing, Born on 28.6.1943, is a German physicist. For his discovery of the Quantum Hall Effect he was awarded Nobel Prize in physics in 1985. He followed Prof. Gottfried Landwehr in 1969 for a PhD work to this city where Röntgen, the first Nobel Prize Winner in Physics discovered the X-rays. He finished in 1972 his PhD work and continued with his “habilitation” in order to enter a career in academia. After a one-year postdoc stay in Oxford (England) he finished the habilitation in 1978. With a Heisenberg fellowship he had the opportunity to select the best research organization in order to continue his research and he moved in 1979 to the high magnetic field laboratory in Grenoble, a research center operated in cooperation with the Max Planck Society in Germany and the CNRS in France. In this laboratory he discovered in the night of 4/5. 2. 1980 the quantum Hall effect which led finally in 1985 to the Nobel Prize in Physics.Already before this important discovery, he received an offer as a professor at the Technical University München where he held this position until the end of 1984. Since 1.1.1985 he is director at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart. After the Nobel Prize in Physics 1985, announced on 16.10.1985, many other awards and honors followed, the most important one is the introduction of the “von Klitzing constant” as one of the fundamental constants.