Colloquium

Title:  Composite fermion Fermi sea: Is the glass half empty or half full?

Speaker: Jainendra K. Jain,  Pennsylvania State University

Location: Room 111, Physics Building

Time: 15:00-16:00, Wed, Oct 21, 2015

Abstract:

Composite fermions are emergent topological particles that arise as a result of interaction between electrons confined to two dimensions and exposed to a strong magnetic field. They were postulated to explain the phenomenon of the fractional quantum Hall effect as the integer quantum Hall effect of composite fermions. After a brief pedagogical introduction, I will come to some recent puzzles regarding a remarkable manifestation of composite fermions at the half filled Landau level, namely their Fermi sea, which arises as a non-perturbative consequence of emergent gauge fields in a system where there was no Fermi sea to begin with. An intuitive picture suggests two equally plausible Fermi seas that appear to be topologically distinct and occupy different areas. We provide theoretical evidence that these are in fact dual descriptions of the same state. We calculate the Fermi wave vector in a particle- hole symmetric theory, and find our results to be generally consistent with the experimental results of Kamburov et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 196801 (2014)]. Most remarkably, we predict that the area of the CF Fermi sea slightly violates the cherished Luttinger's area rule of Fermi liquids. This work [A. C. Balram and C. Toke arXiv:1506.02747 (2015) and Phys. Rev. Lett. in press] was supported by the US Department of Energy.

Biography:

JAINENDRA JAIN was born in India, received bachelor’s degree from the Rajasthan University (1979), master’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur (1981), and Ph.D. from Stony Brook University (1985). After postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland and the Yale University, he joined the Stony Brook University as a faculty in 1989, and then moved to Penn State in 1998. Jain is a theoretical physicist interested in unexpected quantum mechanical reorganizations that occur when a large number of particles interact, best known for work leading to the discovery of exotic particles called “composite fermions,” which he had postulated to explain the fractional quantum Hall effect. For this work, Jain was a co-recipient of the American Physical Society’s Oliver E. Buckley Prize in 2002. Jain has received Fellowships from the American Physical Society, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has received the Distinguished Postdoctoral Alumnus Award from the University of Maryland, the ACIPA Distinguished Scholar Prize of the Indian Physics Association, and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He is the author of a monograph titled "Composite Fermions," and has trained 18 Ph. D. students.  He is currently the Evan Pugh University Professor and Erwin W. Mueller Professor at Penn State, and also holds the Raman Visiting Chair and Infosys Visiting Chair Professorships in India.