Sankar Das Sarma

Career

Das Sarma is the Richard E. Prange Chair in Physics [1], a Distinguished University Professor [2], a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), and the Director of the Condensed Matter Theory Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he has been on the physics faculty since 1980. Das Sarma has co-authored [3] more than 600 articles in the Physical Review Journal series of the American Physical Society, including more than 140 publications in Physical Review Letters, and with more than 60,000 citations to his publications (and with more than 100 publications garnering more than 100 citations each) [4], is one of the Institute for Scientific Information Highly-Cited Researchers as well as a Thomson-Reuters Web of Science Highly Cited [5] and Most Influential Researcher [6]. Das Sarma has been one of the Highly-Cited Researchers of the Web of Science continuously during the 2001-2016 fifteen year period. Das Sarma has been among the most-cited theoretical physicists in the 21st century. Das Sarma publishes regularly in Physical Review A, B, E, X, Physical Review Letters, and Reviews of Modern Physics.

In collaboration with Chetan Nayak and Michael Freedman of Microsoft Research, Das Sarma introduced the ν = 5 / 2 topological qubit [7] in 2005, which has led to experiments in building a fault-tolerant quantum computer based on two-dimensional semiconductor structures. Das Sarma's work [8] on graphene has led to the theoretical understanding of graphene carrier transport properties [9] at low densities where the inhomogeneous electron-hole puddles dominate the graphene landscape. In 2006 Das Sarma with Euyheon Hwang provided the basic theory for collective modes and dielectric response in graphene and related chiral two-dimensional materials.[10] In 2011 Das Sarma and collaborators introduced a new class of lattice tight-binding flat-band systems with nontrivial Chern numbers which belongs to the universality class of continuum quantum Hall and fractional quantum Hall systems without any external magnetic fields. Such flat-band tight-binding systems with non-trivial Chern numbers have substantially enhanced the types of possible physical systems for the realization of topological matter. Among Das Sarma's other well-known theoretical contributions [11] to quantum condensed matter physics are: the self-consistent electronic structure calculation of semiconductor heterojunction-based high electron mobility transistor structures, electron-phonon interaction induced polaron effects in low dimensional systems, collective excitation and quasiparticle modes in semiconductor structures such as quantum wire, quantum well and superlattice, hot electron relaxation in semiconductors, quantum Anderson localization, many-body effects and electron-electron interaction in semiconductors, canted antiferromagnetic states in quantum Hall effect, various spin transistor systems, magnetic polaron theory of diluted magnetic semiconductor, coupled spin qubits in semiconductor quantum dots, theory of quantum decoherence of localized electron spins in solids, central spin decoherence problem, spectral diffusion of electron spins in solids, dynamical decoupling and quantum control, quantum transport theory in low dimensional semiconductors, bilayer quantum Hall systems, and realistic solid state effects in the fractional quantum Hall effect phenomena. Das Sarma also made important contributions to the classical statistical mechanics problem of dynamical growth of systems far from equilibrium where his work introduced the standard model for understanding the molecular beam epitaxy of thin film growth, both from a continuum field theory viewpoint [12] in terms of the so-called Villain-Lai-Das Sarma equation and from the discrete atomistic viewpoint [13] in terms of the so-called Das Sarma-Tamborenea model.

Das Sarma came to the USA as a physics graduate student in 1974 after finishing his secondary school (Hare School in Kolkata India), and undergraduate education at Presidency College in Calcutta, India (now Presidency University in Kolkata) where he was born. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from Brown University in 1979 as a doctoral student of John Quinn. Das Sarma has mentored a large number of PhD students and postdoctoral research associates at Maryland, having supervised 30 PhD students and 115 postdoctoral fellows in the 1985–2016 period, with about 80 of these advisees themselves working as theoretical physicists and physics professors all over the world.[14] Das Sarma's research collaborators, as reflected in the coauthors of his scholarly publications, exceed 200 and span six continents. Although Das Sarma has spent his entire academic life as a faculty member at Maryland, he has been a visiting professor at many institutions during his professional career including Technical University of Munich, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, University of Hamburg, Cambridge University, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of New South Wales, Sandia National Laboratories, University of Melbourne, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Institute for Theoretical Physics in Beijing, and Microsoft Station Q Research Center [15]. He is the editor of the book Perspectives in Quantum Hall Effects (ISBN 0-471-11216-X) and a co-author of several well-known review articles on many topics including spintronics, graphene, and quantum computation.