Bulletin Spring‧Summer 2001

Daniel Chee Tsui BA, PhD, Nobel Laureate in Physics Daniel Chee Tsui was born in 1939 in Henan ， China, arrived in Hong Kong in the early 1950s, and spent his secondary school years at Pui Ching Middle School. In this well-known private school, using mother-tongue as language of instruction, he proved to be a very gifted student, winning scholarships that helped to cover the school fees his family would have found it very hard to pay. After he left Pui Ching, he spent one year i n the Hong Kong Government's Special Classes Centre, where he enjoyed the English literature classes on poetry and fiction. In 1958 he continued his studies in the United States. A rmed with a brilliant Bachelor o f Arts degree i n Mathematics from Augustana College, Illinois, he went on to graduate work, gaining a Ph.D. in Physics in 1967 from the University of Chicago, where he became a research associate. After a year, he joined the Solid State Electronics Research Laborator y at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he worke d until 1982, when he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University . Prof. Tsui's research has explored the collective behaviour of electrons in solid state materials, especially those in semiconductors and semiconductor transistors, which are the starting materia l and the building blocks of our modern-day microelectronics. I n an experiment in 1982, he discovered with Prof. Horst St ö rmer that, at low temperatures and in strong magnetic fields, electrons confined to move along the interface between two different semiconductors can form new kinds of quasi-particles with charges that are only fractions of the normal electron charge. The physics that this discovery has brought forth is known as the fractional quantum Hall effect or F QH effect. It has been amai n subject of study by experimental and theoretical physicists ever since. As Wen Xiao-gang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote in his contribution to a tribute to Prof. Tsui, There have been few discoveries that can stimulate theoretic studies and experimental explorations for such a long time... .We are still far away from a complete understanding of F QH systems….We still cannot see the end of the impact of a discovery that happened 17 years ago. This is a sign of truly great discovery.’ (The Joy of the Search for Knowledge, 148-154) Prof. Tsui's Ph.D. supervisor at Chicago, Prof. Stark, goes to the heart of the matter when, looking back at the work of his student, he reflects: T h a t special quality that you have is called scientific integrity.' (Op.cit., 105) I would like also to recall tha t in his paper for the Third Asia Pacific Physics Conference held in The Chinese University of Hong Kong in June, 1988, Prof. Tsui noted that ‘...it is intuitively obvious that in such an ideally pure system the electrons will correlate their motio n to minimize 55th C o n g r e g a t i o n