Stanford applied
physicist receives Franklin medal
Physicist Robert B.
Laughlin, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the
School of Humanities and Sciences, is one of three
scientists to receive this year's Benjamin Franklin Medal
in physics from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
Laughlin, along with Horst
L. Stormer from Bell Laboratories in New Jersey and
Daniel C. Tsui of Princeton University, was honored for
the discovery and explanation of a bizarre, liquid-like
behavior of electrons at extremely cold temperatures and
high magnetic fields called the fractional quantum Hall
effect.
In 1982 Stormer and Tsui
discovered this effect when they sandwiched together two
dissimilar semiconductor wafers and cooled them to very
low temperatures in the presence of a strong magnetic
field. They discovered that certain magnetic field
strengths, the electrons in the material behaved as if
they had a fractional charge, something that is
physically impossible.
Laughlin figured out that
the magnetic field was creating microscopic vortices in
the material's electrical field that became filled with
electrons that form a quantum liquid with unusual
characteristics, including fractional charges. It was the
movement of these vortices that produced the effect that
Stormer and Tsui had discovered. Since then Laughlin has
been applying the insights that he has gained from
explaining this effect to high-temperature
superconductivity.
"The Benjamin
Franklin Medal is intended to honor . . . pioneering
work, which not only explain[s] a particular phenomenon,
but also opens up a new realm of scientific
inquiry," according to the Franklin Institute.
This year the institute
awarded a total of four such medals in the fields of
physics, chemistry, engineering and life sciences.
Previous recipients of the physics medal, which has been
awarded since 1825, include Marie and Pierre Curie, Niels
Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein. The institute was
founded in 1824 to promote scientific inquiry and
recognize scientific achievement. SR
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