Doctoral advisor Philip B. Allen Fields Condensed matter physics Role Physicist | Name Jainendra Jain Known for Composite fermions Books Composite fermions | |
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Notable awards Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada | ||
Jainendra K. Jain is an Indian American physicist, who is the Evan Pugh University Professor and Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University. Jain is known for his theoretical work on quantum many body systems, most notably for postulating particles known as Composite Fermions.
Biography
Jain was born in Rajasthan, India in 1960. He received his primary, middle and high school education in Government Darbar School in a rural desert town called Sambhar, Rajasthan, achieving third rank in the 10th grade and second rank in the 11th grade in the state of Rajasthan. He received bachelor's degree in physics in 1979 at Maharaja College, Jaipur and master's degree in physics in 1981 at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He completed his PhD in physics at the Stony Brook University in 1985, and worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Maryland and the Yale University before joining Stony Brook University as a faculty in 1989. In 1998 he moved to the Pennsylvania State University as the first Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics. In 2012, Penn State University awarded Jain with Evan Pugh University Professorship, named after the first president of the university.
Jain is a quantum physicist in the field of condensed matter theory with interests in the area of strongly interacting electronic systems in low dimensions. As the originator of the exotic particles called composite fermions, he developed the composite fermion theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect and unified the fractional and the integral quantum Hall effects. His writings include a monograph Composite Fermions, published in 2007 by the Cambridge University Press.
Jain was a co-recipient of the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society in 2002, along with Nicholas Read and Robert Willet. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has held many visiting professorships, including KIAS Scholar at Korea Institute for Advanced Study, Seoul, Sir J. C. Bose Visiting Chair at IISER, Pune, DST-IISc Centenary Visiting Chair Professor at IISc, Bangalore, and Infosys Chair Visiting Professor at IISc, Bangalore. He has received Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT, Kanpur, and Distinguished Postdoctoral Alumnus Award of University of Maryland.