Jainendra K. Jain
Erwin
W. Mueller Professor of Physics
Department of Physics
The Pennsylvania State
University
104 Davey Laboratory
University Park, PA
16802
Tel: (814) 574-7497
Fax: (814) 865-3604
Email: jain at
phys.psu.edu
B.Sc. Maharaja
College, Jaipur
, India,1979
M.Sc.
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, 1981
Ph.D. SUNY @ Stony Brook,
1985
I had my schooling in Sambhar, a
tiny village located at the eastern margin of the Thar desert in
Rajasthan, India.
After receiving my Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the Maharaja
College, Jaipur, and the Indian
Institute of Technology, Kanpur, I joined the Stony Brook University
in 1981 for my Ph.D. in physics, which I completed in 1985 under the
guidance of Professor
Philip B. Allen. After postdoctoral work at the University of
Maryland and the Yale Univeristy, I returned to the Stony Brook
University as an Assistant Professor in 1989, was promoted to Associate
Professor (1993) and Full Professor (1997), and moved in 1998 to the
Pennsylvania State University as the Erwin W. Mueller Professor of
Physics.
As a many body condensed matter theorist, my primary focus has been the
study of unexpected conceptual structures that emerge when electrons
behave cooperatively. Closest to my heart has been the fractional
quantum Hall effect, which provides a new paradigm for collective
behavior, and which is one of the most remarkable phenomena discovered
in physics during the last three decades. My most important
contribution has been the introduction of exotic new particles which I
named "composite
fermions," and the explanation of the puzzling fractional
quantum Hall effect as the integral quantum Hall effect of composite
fermions, thus unifying the two phenomena. While particles such as
protons, neutrons or helium atoms are bound states of elementary
particles, the composite fermion is a topological bound state of an
electron and an even number of quantized vortices in the many-particle
quantum mechanical wave function; composite fermions are topological
particles because one of their consituents, namely the vortices, are
topological objects. Composite fermions have been directly observed in
numerous experiments, and exhibit a multitude of phenomena and states
besides the fractional quantum Hall effect. Their topological nature
manifests most directly through an effective magnetic field, which has
been confirmed in numerous experimentss. More information can be found
in the padagogical articles and text books listed here; another
source is my book "Composite
Fermions" (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
I have had the good fortune to collaborate with many wonderful students
and colleagues. Topics to which we have made contributions include:
plasmons in semiconductor superlattices (with Phil Allen and Sankar Das
Sarma); tunneling in a high magnetic field (with Steve Kivelson); hot
electron relaxation in semiconductors (with Sankar Das Sarma and
Rodolfo Jalabert); the Landauer formulation of the integral quantum
Hall effect (with Steve Kivelson); slave boson study of strongly
correlated systems (with Lizeng Zhang and Victor Emery); quantum dots
in high magnetic fields (with Tetsuo Kawamura, Gun Sang Jeon, Chia-Chen
Chang, Rajiv Kamilla, Devrim Guclu, Cyrus Umrigar, and Chuntai Shi);
composite fermion states and their excitations involving spin (with
Xiao Guang Wu, Kwon Park, and Sudhansu Mandal); skyrmions in FQHE (with
Rajiv Kamilla);
edge states (with Sudhanshu Mandal, Gun Sang Jeon, and Shivakumar
Jolad);
collective excitations / rotons in FQHE (with Gautam Dev, Rajiv
Kamilla, Vito Scarola, Kwon Park, and Michael Peterson); pairing of
composite fermions at nu=5/2 (with Kwon Park, Vito Scarola, Nick
Bonesteel, Csaba Toke, and Nicolas Regnault);
fractional statistics (with Gun Sang Jeon, Kenneth Graham, Fred
Goldhaber, and Chuntai Shi);
stripes of composite fermions (with S.-Y. Lee and Vito Scarola);
composite fermion crystal (with Chia-Chen Chang, Gun Sang Jeon, and
Csaba Toke);
FQHE of composite fermions (with Chia-Chen Chang and Kwon Park);
electron spectral function in FQHE (with Michael Peterson);
bilayer FQHE (with Vito Scarola); composite fermionization of rapidly
rotating bosons (with Chia-Chen Chang, Nicolas Regnault and Thierry
Jolicoeur);
FQHE in graphene (with Csaba Toke, Paul Lammert, and Vin Crespi);
conformal field theory of composite fermions (with Hans Hansson,
Susanne Viefers, and Chia-Chen Chang).
Thanks to Priti Shah for the "Happy composite fermions on a coffee cup"
artwork displayed above.
Selected
Publications
Honors
Collaborators
EPQHS2 (Emergent
Phenomena in Quantum Hall Systems-2)
Penn State Physics Home
