Prof. Horst Stormer Retires

Jul 01 2011

Horst Stormer, Professor of Applied Physics and the I.I. Rabi Professor of Physics, has retired.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, he received his Diploma degree in Physics in 1974 from the local Goethe University and a Ph.D. in 1977 from the University of Stuttgart. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the renowned Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ where he spent the next 25 years. He became a Member of Technical Staff in 1978 and headed the Semiconductor Physics Research Department from 1983 to 1992. He then became Director of the Physical Research Laboratory of, heading most of the fundamental physics research activities. In 1997, he moved to Adjunct Physics Director of Bell Labs, now part of Lucent Technologies, and became a Professor in the Department of Physics and the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics of Columbia University.

Prof. Stormer has worked extensively on the properties of two-dimensional electron sheets in semiconductors and published more than 200 papers on this and on related subjects. In 1978 Stormer co-invented a technique that “speeds up” electrons in semiconductors. The world’s fastest and quietest transistors are based on this principle. The very same invention has lead to the discovery of amazing new physics, in which Prof. Stormer participated in 1982. Prof.  Stormer and his colleagues received numerous awards for the discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect, the most prestigious of which being the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics. His recent work focuses on transport in single molecules.

In addition to maintaining a distinguished research program, Prof. Stormer has been an enthusiastic spokesperson for the nanotechnology community.

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