Heart of the matter

'Beauty, to us physicists, is an idea that unifies and explains,' says Jain. He discovered a new state of matter - years ago - that is now helping Microsoft build its quantum chips.

- Kanika Sharma

There are new formulas named after him. His particles could lead to the discovery of even weirder ones. And Jain recently won the Wolf Prize, considered second only to the Nobel. That's quite the arc, for a boy from a Rajasthan village school who simply wanted to fly.

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," he 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; 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.