ABSTRACT
The discovery of the quantum Hall effect in 1980 by von Klitzing (Figure 15.1) has been one of the most remarkable events that made a great impact on the development of condensed matter physics. He found that the Hall conductance is quantized in integer units of e2/h; therefore, the effect is known as the integer quantum Hall effect (IQHE). For this work, von Klitzing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1985. This discovery was followed by another important one by Tsui et al. in 1982, who found the existence of steps in Hall conductance in units of rational fractions, known as the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE). Laughlin was able to explain FQHE based on a wave function proposed by him. Tsui, Stormer, and Laughlin were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998 for their work on FQHE.
