Born in 1960, Jain received his primary, middle and high school education in a government school in a rural village called
Sambhar, Rajasthan
, located at the eastern margin of Thar desert in India. He received bachelor's degree at
Maharaja College, Jaipur
,
[1]
his master's degree in physics at
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur
[1]
and PhD at the
Stony Brook University
,
[1]
where he worked with Profs. Philip B. Allen and Steven A. Kivelson. After post-doctoral positions at the
University of Maryland
and the
Yale University
he returned to the
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.
[1]
In 2012, Penn State University awarded Jain with
Evan Pugh
University Professorship,
[2]
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
,
[3]
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 Willett
"For theoretical and experimental work establishing the composite fermion model for the half-filled Landau level and other quantized Hall systems".
[4]
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
.
[5]
In 2021, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
[6]