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Nobel 1985: the quantum Hall effect

Nature Reviews Physics volume 7, page 533 (2025)Cite this article

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At 2 a.m., on 5 February 1980, a German scientist watching the trace on his X–Y recorder at the high magnetic field lab in Grenoble, France noticed something in his data that made him pause. The resistance of the sample he was measuring appeared to be plateauing at highly specific values. Although theory predicted that there were ideal quantized values of Hall resistance, it was expected that in practice, there would be deviations from the ideal caused by scattering and impurities. But a quick scribble in his notebook confirmed that the plateaus in the data matched the ideal Hall resistance to an accuracy of 1 part in 1,000. Five years later, the scientist, Klaus von Klitzing (pictured), was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the quantized Hall effect.

The key to solving the puzzle was realizing that the measured resistivity was independent of the sample dimensions. The surprising finite resistivity value at zero conductivity is, in fact, ℏ/e2, the quantized Hall resistance. When von Klitzing set up his measurements in Grenoble, he was intending to quantify the deviation of the measured Hall resistance from the ideal values, to deduce the scattering mechanisms at play. It was the precision of the measurement that made him look more closely. In the weeks after he returned home to the University of Wurzburg, von Klitzing repeated the measurement with as many samples as possible. All showed the same quantized resistance values, now accurate to 1 part in a million.

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Change history

  • 09 October 2025

    In the version of the article initially published, the image credit line was incorrect and has now been amended to “Erich Braun, PTB” in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

References

Original article

  • von Klitzing, K., Dorda, G. & Pepper, M. New method for high-accuracy determination of the fine-structure constant based on quantized Hall resistance. Phys. Rev. Lett. 45, 494–497 (1980)

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Related articles

  • von Klitzing, K. Quantum Hall effect: discovery and application. Annu. Rev. Condens. Matter Phys. 8, 13–30 (2017)

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  • von Klitzing, K. Essay: quantum Hall effect and the new International System of Units. Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 200001 (2019)

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  1. Nature Reviews Physics https://www.nature.com/natrevphys/

    Ankita Anirban

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  1. Ankita Anirban
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Correspondence to Ankita Anirban.

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Anirban, A. Nobel 1985: the quantum Hall effect. Nat Rev Phys 7, 533 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-025-00883-9

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