Horst Ludwig Störmer

Störmer was born in Frankfurt am Main, and grew up in the nearby town of Sprendlingen. After graduating from the Goetheschule in Neu-Isenburg in 1967, he enrolled in architectural engineering at the TH Darmstadt, but later moved to the Goethe University Frankfurt to study physics, but since he had missed the registration period for physics, he began with a mathematics and later changed to physics, qualifying for his Diploma in the laboratory of Werner Martienssen. Here he was supervised by Eckhardt Hoenig, and worked alongside another future Nobel laureate, Gerd Binnig. Störmer moved to France to carry out his PhD research in Grenoble, working in a high-magnetic field laboratory which was run jointly between the French CNRS and the German Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Störmer's academic advisor was Hans-Joachim Queisser, and he was awarded a PhD by the University of Stuttgart in 1977 for his thesis on investigations of electron hole droplets subject to high magnetic fields. He also met his wife, Dominique Parchet, while working in Grenoble. He retired as professor emeritus in 2011. Störmer is a naturalized US citizen. ==Research career==

Perhaps as important as the work for which he won the Nobel prize is his invention of modulation doping, a method for making extremely high mobility two dimensional electron systems in semiconductors. This enabled the later observation of the fractional quantum Hall effect, which was discovered by Störmer and Tsui in October 1981 in an experiment carried out in the Francis Bitter High Magnetic Field Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Within a year of the experimental discovery, Robert Laughlin was able to explain its results. Störmer, Tsui and Laughlin were jointly awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. ==References==