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) 863-1162
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 is the 1989 prediction 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 the bound state of an electron and an even number of
quantized vortices in the many-particle quantum mechanical wave function.
Composite fermions have
been directly observed in numerous experiments, and exhibit a multitude of phenomena and states
besides the fractional quantum Hall effect. More information can be found in
the padagogical articles listed below, and also in my recent 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).
Some pedagogical
articles
"The fractional
quantum Hall effect," Rev. Mod. Phys. 71, S298-S305 (1999), H.L.
Stormer, D.C. Tsui, A.C. Gossard
"The
composite fermion: A quantum particle and its quantum fluids,"
Physics Today, 53(4), 39 (2000), J.K. Jain
"Research
Topic: Composite Fermions ," K. von Klitzing group
"Composite
fermions and the Fermion-Chern-Simons Theory," Physica E 20, 71-78
(2003), B.I. Halperin
"The role of
analogy in unraveling the fractional quantum Hall effect mystery,"
Physica E 20, 79-88 (2003), J.K. Jain
