Robert B. Laughlin is an American physicist known for his work in condensed matter physics, particularly in the area of quantum fluids and the quantum Hall effect. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998, along with Horst Ludwig Störmer and Daniel C. Tsui, for their discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect.
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Robert B. Laughlin proposed correlated many-electron wave functions explaining important states of the fractional quantum Hall effect. The variational construction strongly suppresses configurations in which electrons approach one another while keeping them within the lowest Landau level. Its excited states behave as localized disturbances carrying a fraction of the electron electric charge. The theory connects a microscopic correlated state with an incompressible quantum fluid, rather than interpreting the fractional plateau as an ordinary filled electron band.[ref]
Anomalous Quantum Hall Effect: An Incompressible Quantum Fluid with Fractionally Charged Excitations by Robert Laughlin. Physical Review Letters 50, 1395 (1983), ground-state and excited-state variational construction
Portrait of Robert B. Laughlin
. Markus Pössel, own photograph at the 62nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 6 July 2012. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported., via Wikimedia Commons. Source.