Hall effect

The Hall effect is the production of a potential difference (the Hall voltage) across an electrical conductor that is transverse to an electric current in the conductor and to an applied magnetic field perpendicular to the current. It was discovered by Edwin Hall in 1879. The Hall coefficient is defined as the ratio of the induced electric field to the product of the current density and the applied magnetic field. It is a characteristic of the material from which the conductor is made, since its value depends on the type, number, and properties of the charge carriers that constitute the current. History of electromagnetic theory The modern theory of electromagnetism was systematized by James Clerk Maxwell in the paper "On Physical Lines of Force", which was published in four parts between 1861 and 1862. While Maxwell's paper established a solid mathematical basis for electromagnetic theory, the detailed mechanisms of the theory were still being explored. One such question was about the details of the interaction between magnets and electric current, including whether magnetic fields interacted with the conductors or the electric current itself. In 1879 Edwin Hall was exploring this interaction, and discovered the Hall effect while he was working on his doctoral degree at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Eighteen years before the electron was discovered, his measurements of the tiny effect produced in the apparatus he used were an experimental tour de force, published under the name "On a New Action of the Magnet on Electric Currents". The term ordinary Hall effect can be used to distinguish the effect described in the introduction from a related effect which occurs across a void or hole in a semiconductor or metal plate when current is injected via contacts that lie on the boundary or edge of the void. The charge then flows outside the void, within the metal or semiconductor material. The effect becomes observable, in a perpendicular applied magnetic field, as a Hall voltage appearing on either side of a line connecting the current-contacts.