The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the physics prize to Robert B. Laughlin of Stanford University, Horst L. Stormer of Columbia University and Daniel C. Tsui of Princeton University for their discovery that, under certain circumstances, electrons act like weird "quasiparticles" with only a fraction of the electrical charge that an electron is supposed to have.

The chemistry prize went to Walter Kohn of the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and John A. Pople, a British citizen working at Northwestern University, for devising ways to calculate mathematically how chemical bonds among atoms form and change. The process is so difficult that Paul Dirac, one of the architects of quantum theory, observed in 1929 that it produced "equations much too complicated to be soluble."

On its face, the physics research seems to contradict one of the bedrock axioms of modern science -- namely, that the electron is a truly elementary particle, with no apparent structure, no subcomponents and an unvarying electrical charge. Yet what Stormer and Tsui observed in the lab, and what Laughlin later explained in theory, were unexpected entities that were comporting themselves as if they were one-third or two-fifths or some other peculiar fraction of an electron. This made no sense, especially since the experimenters were examining the seemingly well-studied (Edwin) Hall effect, a phenomenon with a century-old pedigree.