Summer 2001 -- Vol. 18, No. 2

FACES OF PENN STATE

Jainendra Jain
Erwin W. Mueller Professor of Physics

Theoretical physicist Jainendra Jain became interested in physics as a youth in India while reading about quantum mechanics. Among his large family and group of friends from his home, he is the only scientist.

Away from his office and away from physics, Jainendra Jain admits he wastes little effort trying to find answers to problems or fix things. He saves that energy to focus on his work—and he does that quite well.

As the theorist who first predicted the existence of the composite fermion in 1989, Jain secured his position as an important contributor in the field of materials science when the existence of the particle was proven a few years later. His ongoing efforts, and those of his collaborators, only add to his impact. Gaining acceptance for the idea of the composite fermion was not easy, though.

“Most experts initially thought the idea was wrong,” Jain says. “It took three or four years of sustained calculations, work, and sleepless nights before some people accepted that it was at least an interesting possibility. Then others joined in and experimentalists proved it actually exists.”

In the future, composite fermions—bizarre quantum particles that behave as ordinary electrons in some respects but in strikingly novel ways in other respects—might play a role in the development of electronic devices such as quantum computers. Such applications remain far off because of the extreme temperatures and magnetic conditions needed to create composite fermions. The first goal is to understand them as well as possible.

“Composite-fermion systems exhibit marvelous properties, which are unexpected and inexplicable when you think of them as a collection of weakly interacting electrons. But, they can be understood and modeled when you think of them as a system of composite particles,” Jain says. “It is irresistible to imagine the potential uses for them.”

Almost every day, Jain ponders the possibilities. People such as Vito Scarola, Seung-Yeop Lee, Sudhansu Mandal, and Kenneth Graham, graduate and post-graduate researchers at Penn State, have helped understand the particles as well. Experimental colleagues around the world, and the relatively inexpensive nature of condensed-mater physics, make the work a bit easier.

“It is different from high-energy physics where if you want to see a Higgs boson (an important base particle) you have to have a huge facility and hundreds of researchers,” Jain says. “In condensed-matter physics, these are mostly table-top experiments. A Higgs boson costs tens of millions of dollars to discover. By comparison, a composite fermion comes cheap.”

Understanding the particle and its potential requires great effort, and Jain enjoys focusing his energy on such matters. He admits his family and friends might not know exactly what he does—“Sometimes with science, especially physics, you have to have a strong background in the field just to understand the language,” he says—but his efforts might be quite clear and easy to understand when applications for the composite fermion become a reality.

-- By Steve Sampsell

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