Daniel Chee Tsui was born on 28 February 1939 into a farming family in Baofeng, Henan, and travelled alone to Hong Kong in 1951 at the age of twelve to join his sister. Having to learn Cantonese and English, he repeated Primary Six and in 1952 entered Pui Ching Middle School, which was known for its strength in the natural sciences; he finished his secondary education on a scholarship in 1957 with excellent results and spent a further year in the Hong Kong Government's special class for Chinese secondary-school graduates, based at Clementi Secondary School, preparing for the University of Hong Kong. He had also been admitted to the medical school of National Taiwan University but chose to stay in Hong Kong and later accepted a church scholarship to study abroad. In 1958 he went to Augustana College in Illinois, majoring in mathematics and graduating in 1961, and he earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago in 1967. He joined Bell Laboratories and spent about fourteen years studying two-dimensional electron systems. In 1982, working with Horst Störmer and Arthur Gossard at extremely high magnetic fields and very low temperatures, he measured plateaus in Hall conductance at fractional values — the fractional quantum Hall effect — showing that electrons can condense into a new kind of quantum fluid whose quasiparticles carry a fraction of an electron's charge, which reshaped condensed matter physics and the theory of quantum fluids. He moved to Princeton University in 1982 and in 1998 shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Störmer and Robert Laughlin for that discovery, becoming another ethnic Chinese scientist to win a Nobel after Yang Chen-ning, T. D. Lee, Samuel Ting, Yuan T. Lee and Steven Chu. He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 1984 and received the American Physical Society's Oliver E. Buckley Prize that year and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics in 1998. He holds an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Hong Kong (2007), and is a member of Academia Sinica and a founding fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences.
Daniel Tsui is one of the few ethnic Chinese scientists to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, having built his career on a secondary education in Hong Kong. The fractional quantum Hall effect remains a cornerstone of condensed matter physics and the theory of quantum fluids. His path is often cited in Hong Kong as an example for science education, encouraging local students to pursue basic research.
Achievements
- 1967 · Earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago.
- 1982 · Discovered the fractional quantum Hall effect and joined Princeton University the same year.
- 1998 · Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.