James P. Eisenstein is an American physicist noted for his experimental research on strongly interacting two-dimensional electron systems.
Following a few years as an assistant professor of physics at Williams College, Eisenstein became a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill, New Jersey in 1983.
At very low temperatures and high magnetic fields, such systems exhibit a host of exotic phenomena, notably the integer and fractional quantum Hall effects.
Among Eisenstein's most significant research contributions is the discovery of the first "even denominator" fractional quantized Hall state, the first observation of "stripe" and "bubble" 2D quantum electronic phases, and the first detection of the long-sought phenomenon of excitonic Bose condensation.
[5] The stripe and bubble phases[6] [7] reveal that in the quantum regime point-like electrons can organize themselves into configurations[8] which resemble classical liquid crystals comprising complex asymmetric molecules.