Jainendra Jain

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