Sankar Das Sarma

Sankar Das Sarma is an India-born American theoretical condensed matter physicist. He has been a member of the department of physics at University of Maryland, College Park since 1980.

Das Sarma is the Richard E. Prange Chair in Physics, a distinguished university professor, a Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), and the director of the Condensed Matter Theory Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Career
Das Sarma came to the United States from India as a physics graduate student in 1974 after finishing his secondary school (Hare School in Kolkata) and undergraduate education at Presidency College in Calcutta, India (now Presidency University in Kolkata) where he was born. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from Brown University in 1979 as a doctoral student of John Quinn.

In collaboration with Chetan Nayak and Michael Freedman of Microsoft Research, Das Sarma introduced the $$\nu=5/2 $$ topological qubit in 2005,  which has led to experiments in building a fault-tolerant quantum computer based on two-dimensional semiconductor structures. Das Sarma's work on graphene has led to the theoretical understanding of graphene carrier transport properties at low densities where the inhomogeneous electron-hole puddles dominate the graphene landscape. In 2006 Das Sarma with Euyheon Hwang provided the basic theory for collective modes and dielectric response in graphene and related chiral two-dimensional materials. In 2011 Das Sarma and collaborators introduced a new class of lattice tight-binding flat-band systems with nontrivial Chern numbers which belongs to the universality class of continuum quantum Hall and fractional quantum Hall systems without any external magnetic fields. Such flat-band tight-binding systems with non-trivial Chern numbers have substantially enhanced the types of possible physical systems for the realization of topological matter.

In 2010, Das Sarma and collaborators, made a prediction that Majorana fermions will be found in condensed matter, in particular, in semiconductor nanowires. This has led to considerable experimental activity, led by Microsoft Corporation, to produce a topological quantum computer.

He has been a visiting professor at many institutions during his professional career, including Technical University of Munich, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, University of Hamburg, Cambridge University, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of New South Wales, Sandia National Laboratories, University of Melbourne, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Institute for Theoretical Physics in Beijing, and Microsoft Station Q Research Center.