Nobel Lecture: The fractional quantum Hall effect
Abstract
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…
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