Robert B. Laughlin - Fractional Quantum Hall Effect
Robert Laughlin was born November 1, 1950, in Visalia, California, then a rural/agricultural community. His father had a private law practice and his mother taught school. He has a brother, John, and a sister, Margaret.
He took an early interest in how things worked and took apart appliances and mechanical devices to learn for himself. He preferred to acquire knowledge firsthand rather than reading about it in a book. His father encouraged independent thinking and frank debate, as well as the importance of mathematics, and his mother encouraged all kinds of learning.
Laughlin entered the University of California at Berkeley to major in electrical engineering, but changed his major and received an AB in mathematics in 1972. He missed a double major in mathematics and physics due to bad grades.
It was during the Vietnam war, and he was drafted into military service. He was sent to missile school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and then spent his tour of duty in Germany. He never saw combat. He spent much of his free time learning to speak German.
Laughlin was accepted to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974 and received his Ph.D. in 1979. He met and married his wife, Anita, at MIT.
Following graduate school, Laughlin accepted a post doctorate position at Bell Labs in the Theory Group. During this time, he wrote an explanation of what would be called the gauge argument for Hall conductance. Laughlin was not offered a permanent job at Bell Labs. He declined a position at Purdue to take a post doctorate lab position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At Livermore, he conducted the assigned research and followed up on his quantum Hall project on the side. Horst Stormer and Daniel Tsui, whom he worked with at Bell Labs, sent him information about their discovery of fractional quantum Hall effect. Laughlin worked out the theoretical framework for quantum fluid. It was this work for which the three shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998.
Laughlin remained at Livermore on a part-time basis, but accepted a full-time position at Stanford in 1985 as an associate professor. He became a professor in 1989 and then the Robert M. and Ann Bass Professor of Physics. His work changed to more teaching and less research.
Laughlin left Stanford in 2004 to become president of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea.
Honors and Awards
- E.O. Lawrence Award for Physics, 1985
- Oliver E. Buckley Prize, 1986
- Eastman Kodak Lecturer, University of Rochester, 1989
- Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1990
- Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
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