Daniel C. Tsui

Daniel Chee Tsui (born February 28, ) is a Chinese-born American experimental physicist best known for co-discovering the fractional quantum Hall effect in 1982, a groundbreaking observation of quantized conductance in two-dimensional electron systems under strong magnetic fields that revealed a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations. For this work, conducted with Horst L. Störmer at Bell Laboratories and theoretically explained by Robert B. Laughlin, Tsui shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is the Arthur Legrand Doty Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, where he has focused on condensed matter physics since 1982.

Tsui was born in a remote village in Henan Province, China, during a period of hardship marked by the Sino-Japanese War, drought, and floods; his illiterate parents emphasized education, sending him to Hong Kong in 1951 to begin formal schooling at Pui Ching Middle School. After graduating in 1957, he received a full scholarship to Augustana College in Illinois, earning a B.A. in physics in 1961 as a Phi Beta Kappa member, before obtaining his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1967 under the influence of the parity non-conservation work by Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee.