About
Robert Betts Laughlin, born November 1, 1950, in Visalia, California, is an American physicist. He earned his PhD from MIT in 1979 and worked at Bell Labs and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1983, he provided the theoretical explanation for the fractional quantum Hall effect via the Laughlin wavefunction. For this discovery, he shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics with Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui. Professor at Stanford since 1985, he also served as president of KAIST and the Asia-Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics (2004-2006). He is the author of several popular science books.
* 1950-11-01
Major works
- A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (2005)non-fiction
- The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind (2008)non-fiction
Key milestones
- 1983Proposed the Laughlin wavefunction explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect.
- 1998Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics with Horst Störmer and Daniel Tsui.
- 2004Becomes president of KAIST and the Asia-Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics.
Themes
Condensed matter physicsQuantum Hall effectEmergenceScience communicationScience education
Sources: beta.nobelprize.org · physics.stanford.edu · britannica.com