Jainendra K. Jain

Jainendra K. Jain is an Indian American physicist, who is the 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 Composite fermions.

Biography

Jain was born in Rajasthan, India in 1960 and went to school in Sambhar, Rajasthan. He received his bachelor’s degree at Maharaja College, Jaipur and master’s degree at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He completed his PhD in physics at the Stony Brook University in 1985. He worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Maryland and the Yale University and held faculty position at Stony Brook University, before joining Pennsylvania State University as the Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics.

Jain is a condensed matter theorist 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 by Cambridge University Press, 2007.