Störmer was born inFrankfurt am Main, and grew up in the nearby town ofSprendlingen. After graduating from the Goetheschule inNeu-Isenburg in 1967, he enrolled in architectural engineering at theTH Darmstadt, but later moved to theGoethe University Frankfurt to study physics, but since he had missed the registration period for physics, he began with a mathematics and later changed to physics, qualifying for his Diploma in the laboratory of Werner Martienssen. Here he was supervised by Eckhardt Hoenig, and worked alongside another future Nobel laureate,Gerd Binnig.[3]
Störmer moved to France to carry out his PhD research in Grenoble, working in a high-magnetic field laboratory which was run jointly between the French CNRS and the German Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Störmer's academic advisor was Hans-Joachim Queisser, and he was awarded a PhD by theUniversity of Stuttgart in 1977 for his thesis on investigations of electron hole droplets subject to high magnetic fields. He also met his wife, Dominique Parchet, while working in Grenoble.[3] They divorced each other a few years later.
Perhaps as important as the work for which he won the Nobel prize is his invention ofmodulation doping, a method for making extremely high mobility two dimensional electron systems in semiconductors. This enabled the later observation of thefractional quantum Hall effect, which was discovered by Störmer and Tsui in October 1981 in an experiment carried out in the Francis Bitter High Magnetic Field Lab at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. Within a year of the experimental discovery,Robert Laughlin was able to explain its results. Störmer, Tsui and Laughlin were jointly awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.[7]
