Physics: honor to von Klitzing.

For the discovery of the quantized Hall effect, Klaus von Klitzing of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State research in Stuttgart, West Germany, is the sole recipient of the 1985 Nobel Prize in physics. Von Klitzing's discovery, made in 1980, is a variation of the ordinary Hall effect.

The American physicists E.H. Hall had discovered that if a metal conducting an electric current is subjected to a magnetic field, the electrons that make up the current are deflected, and there appears a Hall conductivity in the direction transverse to the original current direction. Von Klitzing found that if the metal is made very thin and bonded to a semiconductor and the assembly is chilled to near absolute zero, the Hall conductivity is quantized: It appears in integral multiples of the fundamental constant e.sup.2./h, the square of the electron charge divided by Planck's constant. The quantized Hall effect facilitates precise measurement of fundamental constants and makes possible precise standards of electrical resistance. It has many applications in electronics.

Born in 1943 to a Germany family in territory that is now part of Poland, von Klitzing studied in West Germany at the Technical University in Brunswick and at the University of Wurzburg. Before joining the Max Planck Institute, he taught at the Technical University in Munich and Marburg University.