Daniel C. Tsui and Horst L. Störmer, at Bell Laboratories, publish in May 1982 "Two-Dimensional Magnetotransport in the Extreme Quantum Limit", where they observe something existing physics did not predict: cooling a sample of extremely high-mobility two-dimensional electrons — fabricated by Arthur C. Gossard using GaAs heterostructures — below 5 K and subjecting it to an intense magnetic field, a new quantized Hall resistance step appears when the lowest Landau level is only one-third occupied (fraction 1/3). This contradicts the established picture of the integer quantum Hall effect, discovered by Klaus von Klitzing in 1980, where quantization steps should only appear at integer occupation values. Tsui and Störmer have no satisfactory theoretical explanation for the phenomenon in 1982: they speculate about the possible formation of a Wigner solid, but the experimental result remains, for months, an anomaly with no conceptual framework. The missing piece arrives in May 1983, when Robert B. Laughlin, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, publishes "Anomalous Quantum Hall Effect: An Incompressible Quantum Fluid with Fractionally Charged Excitations", proposing a variational wave function that shows that, under these extreme conditions, the electrons do not behave as individual particles but collectively condense into a completely new quantum state: an incompressible fluid whose excitations (quasiparticles) carry an exact fraction of the electron's charge — one-third of it, in the case observed — something with no precedent in particle physics as known until then. Neither of the two pieces alone constitutes a gamechanger: Tsui and Störmer's experiment is an unexplained anomaly without Laughlin's theory, and Laughlin's theory would have been pure mathematical speculation without the experimental result demonstrating that the phenomenon occurs in nature. Together they give rise to the study of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE), which becomes one of the most fertile areas of condensed-matter physics, laying the conceptual foundations — composite fermions, anyons, topological states of matter — on which three decades of subsequent research would be built, including possible applications in topological quantum computing.