‘For us physicists, beauty is a new idea that unifies and explains’
Meet Jainendra Jain, who just won the Wolf Prize (considered second only to the Nobel) for a discovery that is now helping Microsoft build its quantum chips.
When Jainendra Jain was 12, he had a favourite story.
It was the one about Satyendra Nath Bose, Einstein and a new theory on photon behaviour. “It was absolutely amazing to me that someone could, just from pure thought, sitting alone at the University of Dhaka, come up with something as fundamental as the concept of bosons, and send ripples through the world,” Jain says.
That story marked the start of his love affair with physics. Jain is now 65 and a condensed-matter physicist at Pennsylvania State University. He recently won the 2025 Wolf Prize (considered second only to the Nobel), for his discovery of a new kind of particle, which he called the composite fermion.
This particle has immense implications for quantum computing; it has spawned bizarre concepts that Microsoft has used to build its first quantum chip, the Majorana 1, unveiled in February. (Hold on to that name, incidentally; the story behind it used to be the stuff of science-fiction, and we’ll get to it in a bit.)
But first, let’s rewind a little. Back when Jain was first smitten by the story of Bose, he was studying in a Hindi-medium village school in Sambhar, Rajasthan. It was just a few rooms and an open ground, but in the children’s magazines he had access to there, he met Bose, and got his heart set on physics.
His heart was set on a lot of things. He was young, clever (“everyone said so”, he chuckles), ambitious. He remembers looking up at the skies and shouting, “One day, I will fly in a plane.” As it turned out, a lot would happen before that did.
He was still 12, on a family holiday to visit relatives in Kolkata, when a tram collided with their car. His mother took the brunt of the impact and never regained consciousness. Jain was critically injured; one of his feet had to be amputated.
“I returned to school several months later, on crutches,” he says. “It is only now, five decades later, that I can admit how much the accident affected me. It felt, at the time, like I would have to put a lid on all my ambitions. For a couple of years, it was not clear whether I would be able to leave home and go to college, or ever have a family.”
***
The famous Jaipur foot, a low-cost prosthetic developed by Dr PK Sethi and craftsman Ram Chandra Sharma in the 1960s, helped him walk again. Bit by bit, Jain began to return to his former self.
His father never lowered his expectations of the boy, and this helped immensely, Jain says. His own love of school kept the momentum going.
He left home on schedule, went to college in Rajasthan, then completed a Master’s in physics at IIT-Kanpur. He finally took to the air in 1981, aged 21. He was headed to New York’s Stony Brook University, for a PhD.
***
Physics is about discovering the hidden order to the world, Jain says. This has always felt like something of a sacred mission to him.
“I find it amazing that the entire universe runs as per these mathematical laws, unchangingly. That… to me, that’s God,” he says. Even though he doesn’t believe in the traditional notions of religion, he adds, his life has been filled with blessings.
The first of these was a state-of-the-art prosthetic he was finally able to buy, with his health insurance as a researcher at Stony Brook. It helped him travel the world. Perhaps more importantly, it helped him teach. Standing in front of students used to be nerve-wracking before it, he says.
The biggest of his blessings has been Manju Jain, 60, his wife and emotional anchor; and their two children, Sunil Jain, 36, a businessman, and Saloni Agarwal, 35, a pharmaceutical consultant.
***
The final blessing came in the form of his specialisation: condensed-matter theory.
Near the end of his first year at Stony Brook, unsure of what his subfield in physics should be, Jain approached an experimental physicist to ask whether he could join his group.
“The professor asked me, ‘Do you enjoy fixing your motorbike or your radio’,” Jain chuckles. Since he had never owned either, he had no answer.
“I next went to professor Chen Ning Yang, a legendary theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate who is now 102 years old, and asked him my question. He said the future is promising for condensed-matter theory. And he introduced me to my advisor, Philip Allen.”
Yang was right. Condensed-matter theory would shape the world of electronics, and is now shaping the worlds of artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
From Stony Brook, Jain moved on to Yale University, as a postdoctoral scholar. Now 28, he watched with interest as new theories took shape in his subfield. His interest was piqued in particular by two experiments, one each out of the US and Germany, that bagged two Nobel Prizes.
These researchers had discovered that when a thin semiconductor sheet is placed in a large magnet, the electrons behave as if they are performing a complex dance, and produce a host of liquid states with conductivities measurable in precise fractions.
There was a piece missing though: no one could figure out how to work out those fractions.
“My wife and I still remember when the idea for the composite fermions struck me,” Jain says. “We were watching TV and I was doodling on a notepad, trying to figure out what we could all be missing. During a commercial break, suddenly, I thought I could see it. It was like when a camera lens comes into focus and one can see the whole picture with total clarity… I realised that if I postulated a new kind of particle, it all seemed to fit.”
Jain’s theory on composite fermions was published months later, in the journal Physical Review Letters. It was 1989. He was not yet 30.
Jain would quietly continue to study his particles, back at Stony Brook, now as an assistant professor. It would be a long while before any recognition came his way.
“For theoretical physicists, beauty is a single idea that explains and unifies a host of seemingly unrelated phenomena,” he says. “Initially I was frustrated that others did not see the incredible beauty in composite fermions that I saw. I’m happy that has changed in time.”
***
It would be 13 years before the first accolades rolled in. In 2002, Jain won the Oliver E Buckley Prize, the most prestigious award for condensed-matter physicists in the US.
Meanwhile, his new state of matter was helping explain and map different kinds of electron behaviour. Others, building on his research, found that his fermions could be used to make a special kind of superconductor, one that spawns even weirder particles, called Majoranas (after which the Microsoft chip is named).
The idea of the Majorana was first proposed by the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, in 1937. So far, its existence has been confined to theory. Companies like Microsoft are now betting big that this is about to change.
A Majorana, once realised, could make the most dramatic dreams about quantum computing a reality. “Think that we are pulling apart a composite fermion into two Majoranas,” Jain says. “You can move the two as far apart as you like. Take one to where you live and keep one in State College where I live. Still the pair remembers its original state. The advantage of this is that a storm in your place will not affect the state of this quantum bit because half of it is in State College. It can thus resist any localised disturbance. This is the promise of a quantum computer based on Majoranas.”
It is generally a long road from theory to rollout, Jain adds. “But many parts of this road have already been laid, so it is possible we will have quantum computers based on this architecture.”
As for Jain, there aren’t textbooks being written about him, at least not yet. “There are fractions that composite fermions explain which are called Jain fractions though,” he says, smiling. That’s quite a flight path, for a little boy who looked up at the sky and dreamed he would one day soar.
When Jainendra Jain was 12, he had a favourite story.
It was the one about Satyendra Nath Bose, Einstein and a new theory on photon behaviour. “It was absolutely amazing to me that someone could, just from pure thought, sitting alone at the University of Dhaka, come up with something as fundamental as the concept of bosons, and send ripples through the world,” Jain says.
That story marked the start of his love affair with physics. Jain is now 65 and a condensed-matter physicist at Pennsylvania State University. He recently won the 2025 Wolf Prize (considered second only to the Nobel), for his discovery of a new kind of particle, which he called the composite fermion.
This particle has immense implications for quantum computing; it has spawned bizarre concepts that Microsoft has used to build its first quantum chip, the Majorana 1, unveiled in February. (Hold on to that name, incidentally; the story behind it used to be the stuff of science-fiction, and we’ll get to it in a bit.)
But first, let’s rewind a little. Back when Jain was first smitten by the story of Bose, he was studying in a Hindi-medium village school in Sambhar, Rajasthan. It was just a few rooms and an open ground, but in the children’s magazines he had access to there, he met Bose, and got his heart set on physics.
His heart was set on a lot of things. He was young, clever (“everyone said so”, he chuckles), ambitious. He remembers looking up at the skies and shouting, “One day, I will fly in a plane.” As it turned out, a lot would happen before that did.
He was still 12, on a family holiday to visit relatives in Kolkata, when a tram collided with their car. His mother took the brunt of the impact and never regained consciousness. Jain was critically injured; one of his feet had to be amputated.
“I returned to school several months later, on crutches,” he says. “It is only now, five decades later, that I can admit how much the accident affected me. It felt, at the time, like I would have to put a lid on all my ambitions. For a couple of years, it was not clear whether I would be able to leave home and go to college, or ever have a family.”
***
The famous Jaipur foot, a low-cost prosthetic developed by Dr PK Sethi and craftsman Ram Chandra Sharma in the 1960s, helped him walk again. Bit by bit, Jain began to return to his former self.
His father never lowered his expectations of the boy, and this helped immensely, Jain says. His own love of school kept the momentum going.
He left home on schedule, went to college in Rajasthan, then completed a Master’s in physics at IIT-Kanpur. He finally took to the air in 1981, aged 21. He was headed to New York’s Stony Brook University, for a PhD.
***
Physics is about discovering the hidden order to the world, Jain says. This has always felt like something of a sacred mission to him.
“I find it amazing that the entire universe runs as per these mathematical laws, unchangingly. That… to me, that’s God,” he says. Even though he doesn’t believe in the traditional notions of religion, he adds, his life has been filled with blessings.
The first of these was a state-of-the-art prosthetic he was finally able to buy, with his health insurance as a researcher at Stony Brook. It helped him travel the world. Perhaps more importantly, it helped him teach. Standing in front of students used to be nerve-wracking before it, he says.
The biggest of his blessings has been Manju Jain, 60, his wife and emotional anchor; and their two children, Sunil Jain, 36, a businessman, and Saloni Agarwal, 35, a pharmaceutical consultant.
***
The final blessing came in the form of his specialisation: condensed-matter theory.
Near the end of his first year at Stony Brook, unsure of what his subfield in physics should be, Jain approached an experimental physicist to ask whether he could join his group.
“The professor asked me, ‘Do you enjoy fixing your motorbike or your radio’,” Jain chuckles. Since he had never owned either, he had no answer.
“I next went to professor Chen Ning Yang, a legendary theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate who is now 102 years old, and asked him my question. He said the future is promising for condensed-matter theory. And he introduced me to my advisor, Philip Allen.”
Yang was right. Condensed-matter theory would shape the world of electronics, and is now shaping the worlds of artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
From Stony Brook, Jain moved on to Yale University, as a postdoctoral scholar. Now 28, he watched with interest as new theories took shape in his subfield. His interest was piqued in particular by two experiments, one each out of the US and Germany, that bagged two Nobel Prizes.
These researchers had discovered that when a thin semiconductor sheet is placed in a large magnet, the electrons behave as if they are performing a complex dance, and produce a host of liquid states with conductivities measurable in precise fractions.
There was a piece missing though: no one could figure out how to work out those fractions.
“My wife and I still remember when the idea for the composite fermions struck me,” Jain says. “We were watching TV and I was doodling on a notepad, trying to figure out what we could all be missing. During a commercial break, suddenly, I thought I could see it. It was like when a camera lens comes into focus and one can see the whole picture with total clarity… I realised that if I postulated a new kind of particle, it all seemed to fit.”
Jain’s theory on composite fermions was published months later, in the journal Physical Review Letters. It was 1989. He was not yet 30.
Jain would quietly continue to study his particles, back at Stony Brook, now as an assistant professor. It would be a long while before any recognition came his way.
“For theoretical physicists, beauty is a single idea that explains and unifies a host of seemingly unrelated phenomena,” he says. “Initially I was frustrated that others did not see the incredible beauty in composite fermions that I saw. I’m happy that has changed in time.”
***
It would be 13 years before the first accolades rolled in. In 2002, Jain won the Oliver E Buckley Prize, the most prestigious award for condensed-matter physicists in the US.
Meanwhile, his new state of matter was helping explain and map different kinds of electron behaviour. Others, building on his research, found that his fermions could be used to make a special kind of superconductor, one that spawns even weirder particles, called Majoranas (after which the Microsoft chip is named).
The idea of the Majorana was first proposed by the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, in 1937. So far, its existence has been confined to theory. Companies like Microsoft are now betting big that this is about to change.
A Majorana, once realised, could make the most dramatic dreams about quantum computing a reality. “Think that we are pulling apart a composite fermion into two Majoranas,” Jain says. “You can move the two as far apart as you like. Take one to where you live and keep one in State College where I live. Still the pair remembers its original state. The advantage of this is that a storm in your place will not affect the state of this quantum bit because half of it is in State College. It can thus resist any localised disturbance. This is the promise of a quantum computer based on Majoranas.”
It is generally a long road from theory to rollout, Jain adds. “But many parts of this road have already been laid, so it is possible we will have quantum computers based on this architecture.”
As for Jain, there aren’t textbooks being written about him, at least not yet. “There are fractions that composite fermions explain which are called Jain fractions though,” he says, smiling. That’s quite a flight path, for a little boy who looked up at the sky and dreamed he would one day soar.
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