Daniel Chee Tsui

While studying at the University of Chicago, he fell in love with Linda Varland, an undergraduate in the college, who he later married.

Daniel Chee Tsu was born on February 28, 1939, in Fan village, Henan, China, into a farming family. He received a humble upbringing in a small village that was prone to droughts and floods and was threatened by war. However, his parents took the greatest care to ensure that the children grew up in a loving atmosphere.

His parents had never received the chance to get educated so they were very particular that their children receive quality education. Since there we no good schools in their village, they sent Tsui to Hong Kong in 1951 for his schooling.

He attended the Pui Ching Middle School where he was taught by highly-qualified teachers who instilled in him an undying thirst for knowledge. He graduated in 1957.

He was admitted to the medical school of National Taiwan University in Taiwan and also enrolled for a two-year special program run by the government to prepare Chinese high school graduates for the University of Hong Kong. Around this time he also received the news that he had received a full scholarship to Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, United States.

He accepted the scholarship and moved to the US in 1958. His college years there were highly productive and he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1961. He then proceeded to the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in physics in 1967.

After a year of postdoctoral research in Chicago, he joined Bell Laboratories in 1968. There he focused his research in solid state physics, especially in semiconductor research.

While he did not venture into semiconductor physics, which was mostly optics and high energy band-structures, or its use in device applications, he built an image for himself as an expert in what was dubbed the physics of two-dimensional electrons.

As a part of the research staff that also included Horst Störmer, he focused his investigations on the Hall effect, which is the development of a crosswise electric field in current-carrying ribbon whose surface lies perpendicular to a strong magnetic field.

Over the course of their investigations, the team examined the quantum Hall effect at temperatures near absolute zero and under extremely powerful magnetic fields. The discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect was a major one in the field of Experimental physics and eventually earned the scientists international acclaim.

Shortly after the discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect, Daniel Chee Tsui accepted the position of Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University in 1982.

Daniel Tsui, in collaboration with Horst Störmer discovered and explained the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE), which is a physical phenomenon in which the Hall conductance of 2D electrons shows precisely quantized plateaus at fractional values of e2/h. It is a collective behavior in a two-dimensional system of electrons.