Robert B. Laughlin

Robert Betts Laughlin, born November 1, 1950, in Visalia, California, is an American physicist who holds the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. He earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1972, followed by a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979. Laughlin served as the president of KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea, from 2004 to 2006.

Laughlin’s most celebrated contribution came in 1983, when he proposed a many-body wave function—now called the Laughlin wavefunction—that explained the fractional quantum Hall effect. This wavefunction correctly accounted for the fractionalized charge observed in experiments, and the state it describes has since been understood as the integer quantum Hall effect of composite fermions. For this work, Laughlin shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics with Horst L. Störmer and Daniel C. Tsui.

Publications

His 2017 paper, “Pumped thermal grid storage with heat exchange,” led to Project Malta at Google X and later the formation of Malta Inc. Laughlin is also the author of several books. In A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (2005), he argues for emergence as a replacement for reductionism and touches on controversial topics. He later published The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind (2008), Powering the Future: How We Will (Eventually) Solve the Energy Crisis and Fuel the Civilization of Tomorrow (2013), and contributed to Mente y materia. ¿Qué es la vida? Sobre la vigencia de Erwin Schrödinger (2010).

Laughlin’s honors include the E. O. Lawrence Award in Physics (1984), the Oliver E. Buckley Prize (1986), election as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1986), membership in the National Academy of Sciences (1994), the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Physics (1998), the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1999), a Doctorate of Letters from the University of Maryland (2005), and the Onsager Medal (2007).