Nobel Lecture: The fractional quantum Hall effect

The fractional quantum Hall effect is a very counterintuitive physical phenomenon. It implies that many electrons, acting in concert, can create new particles having a charge smaller than the charge of any individual electron. This is not the way things are supposed to be. A collection of objects may assemble to form a bigger object, or the parts may remain their size, but they don’t create anything smaller. If the new particles were doubly charged, it wouldn’t be so paradoxical— electrons could ‘‘just stick together’’ and form pairs. But fractional charges are very bizarre indeed. Not only are they smaller than the charge of any constituent electron, but they are exactly 1/3 or 1/5 or 1/7 etc. of an electronic charge, depending on the conditions under which they have been prepared. And yet we know with certainty that none of these electrons has split up into pieces. Fractional charge is the most puzzling of the observations, but there are others. Quantum numbers—usually integers or half-integers—turn out to be also fractional, such as 2/5, 4/9, and 11/7, or even 5/23. Moreover, bits of magnetic field can get attached to each electron, creating yet other objects. Such composite particles have properties very different from those of the electrons. They sometimes seem to be oblivious to huge magnetic fields and move in straight lines, although any bare electron would orbit on a very tight circle. Their mass is unrelated to the mass of the original electron but arises solely from interactions with their neighbors. More so, the attached magnetic field changes drastically the characteristics of the particles, from fermions to bosons and back to fermions, depending on the field strength. And finally, some of these composites are conjectured to coalesce and form pairs, vaguely similar to the formation of electron pairs in superconductivity. This would provide yet another astounding new state with weird properties. All of these strange phenomena occur in twodimensional electron systems at low temperatures exposed to a high magnetic field—only electrons and a magnetic field. The electrons reside within a solid, at the interface between two slightly different semiconductors. This is presently the smoothest plane we can fabricate to restrict the electrons’ motion to two dimensions. Quantum mechanics does the rest.