Jainendra K. Jain
The Pennsylvania State University
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Primary Section: 33, Applied Physical Sciences Secondary Section: 13, Physics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2021)
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Biosketch
Jain is a theoretical physicist, recognized for his work on strongly correlated states of electrons, in particular for the composite-fermion theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect. He is Evan Pugh University Professor and Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University. He grew up and obtained his elementary, middle and high school education in Sambhar, a rural village in the State of Rajasthan, India. He proceeded to earn his bachelor's degree at Maharaja College, Jaipur (1979), master's degree at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (1981), and Ph.D. at Stony Brook University (1985), all in physics. After postdoctoral fellowships at University of Maryland and Yale University, he returned to Stony Brook University as a faculty in 1989, before finally moving to the Pennsylvania State University in 1998. He has held many visiting professorships, most recently the Infosys Visiting Chair at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and recipient of the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society.
Research Interests
Jain is a theoretical condensed matter physicist interested in exotic quantum states of electrons in low dimensions. He is known for predicting the topological particle called composite fermion, namely an electron binding an even number of quantum mechanical vortices, and for explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect as the integral quantum Hall effect of composite fermions, thereby unifying these two phenomena. Jain and his collaborators have been investigating various states and properties of composite fermions, such as their Fermi sea, integral quantum Hall effect, fractional quantum Hall effect, topological superconductivity, Wigner crystal, mass, Landau levels, Fermi wave vector, charged quasiparticles, neutral excitons, spin waves, magnetorotons, skyrmions, magnetic phase transitions, edge states, bilayer states, Bloch ferromagnetism, Hall viscosity, fractional braiding statistics and non-Abelian Majorana modes. They have also been exploring the applicability of the parton construction, a generalization of the composite fermion theory, to certain delicate fractional quantum Hall states. Jain’s other interests include topological insulators, graphene, one-dimensional quantum liquids, and collective excitations.
