The 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Robert Laughlin, Horst Störmer, and Daniel Tsui "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations".
The FQHE was experimentally discovered in 1982 by Daniel Tsui and Horst Störmer, in experiments performed on heterostructures made out of gallium arsenide developed by Arthur Gossard.
Experiments have reported results that specifically support the understanding that there are fractionally-charged quasiparticles in an electron gas under FQHE conditions.
In 1995, the fractional charge of Laughlin quasiparticles was measured directly in a quantum antidot electrometer at Stony Brook University, New York.
[8] In 1997, two groups of physicists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and at the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique laboratory near Paris,[9] detected such quasiparticles carrying an electric current, through measuring quantum shot noise[10][11] Both of these experiments have been confirmed with certainty.
Previously it was held that the symmetry breaking theory could explain all the important concepts and properties of forms of matter.
The existence of FQH liquids suggests that there is much more to discover beyond the present symmetry breaking paradigm in condensed matter physics.