Prize Recipient

Jainendra Jain
Pennsylvania State University

Citation:

"For theoretical and experimental work establishing the composite fermion model for the half-filled Landau level and other quantized Hall systems."

Background:

Jainendra Kumar Jain received his BS (Physics) in 1979 from the Maharaja College, Jaipur, his MS (Physics) in 1981 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and his Ph.D. in 1985 from the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Maryland from 1986-1988 and at Yale University from 1988-1989. He then joined SUNY, Stony Brook where he served as Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor. Since 1998, he has been at The Pennsylvania State University as the Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has been a recipient of Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Jain's most important contribution has been his introduction of electron-flux combinations called "composite fermions". These particles constitute the basis for the understanding of the remarkable properties of the novel quantum fluid formed when electrons are confined to two dimensions and subjected to a strong magnetic field, including the phenomenon of the fractional quantum Hall effect. Jain has extended and developed the theory of composite fermions into several directions, in particular, toward extracting detailed quantitative information which can be compared with exact results as well as experiment.

Selection Committee:

Andrew Millis (Chair)