News & Events

The Mr. Armin and Mrs. Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award was established in 2010 to recognize students who demonstrate outstanding performance in the University-wide Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and to promote research culture among undergraduate students. Mr. Zehan Chen won Champion of the Mr. Armin and Mrs. Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award competition in 2021. Mr. Chen, a 4th-year Physics student who is enrolled in the International Research Enrichment program. He explored the nonlinear and nonreciprocal skyrmion dynamics driven by the current under the supervision of Prof. Qiming SHAO. In Prof. Shao's group, Mr. Chen developed an analytical formulation of current-driven nonlinear skyrmion dynamics in the presence of deformation, which is verified by micromagnetic simulations. In addition, this formulation has been used to predict and understand the nonreciprocal dynamics of skyrmions. Since joining Prof. Shao’s group in September 2019, Zehan has published 2 research papers [1,2]. The Second Runner-Up of the Mr. Armin and Mrs. Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award competition was Mr. Yangbo Zhou. Mr. Zhou is a 4th year Biochemistry and Cell Biology student who carried out his award-winning research under the supervision of Prof. Hyokeun Park in the Departments of Physics and Life Science. Mr. Zhou has been working on “Real-time imaging of single motor proteins”. He along with postgraduate students tracked single myosin X molecules along actin filaments and actin bundles with an accuracy of nanometers and found that coiled-coil region of myosin X plays an important role in stepping of myosin X. His results were presented at the 66th Biophysical Society Annual Meeting held in San Francisco in the USA in Feb 2022.   [1]  Zehan Chen, Xichao Zhang, Yan Zhou, and Qiming Shao, Physical Review Applied 17, L011002 (2022). [2] Laichuan Shen, Jing Xia, Zehan Chen, Xiaoguang Li, Xichao Zhang, Oleg A. Tretiakov, Qiming Shao, Guoping Zhao, Xiaoxi Liu, Motohiko Ezawa, and Yan Zhou, Physical Review B 105, 014422 (2022). Read more

Prof. Kam Biu Luk’ homepage Read more

Five outstanding secondary school students representing Hong Kong have achieved excellent results at the 51st International Physics Olympiad (IPhO 2021). IPhO 2021, organised by Vilnius University in Vilnius, Lithuania, was held from 17-24 July 2021 with around 370 student participants from 76 countries or regions competing for medals. Due to the COIVD-19 pandemic, contestants participated remotely under online monitoring. The Hong Kong team, comprised of Chan Tsz-chun (International Christian Quality Music Secondary and Primary School), Cheng Yat-long (Raimondi College), Lau Sze-chun (Diocesan Boys' School), Choi Wai-ching (La Salle College), Leung Chun-fung (GT (Ellen Yeung) College), won three gold medals and two silver medals. With this outstanding result, the Hong Kong team was ranked 6th among all teams at the competition. This is the Hong Kong team’s best result in recent years. The team was trained and mentored by Profs. Michael Wong, Jensen Li and Ting Pong Choy of the HKUST Department of Physics with the support of the Education Bureau and Hong Kong Academy for Gifted Education.
The HKUST Department of Physics has been providing training to about 90 secondary school students to prepare for the International Physics Olympiad every year since 2003 and the Asian Physics Olympiad (APhO) since 2007. The year-long training program offered to these gifted students covers topics from Newtonian mechanics to modern physics, both theory and experiment. The teams that eventually participate in the IPhO and APhO competitions are chosen from among those who receive training on the basis of their performance in a series of selection tests and competitions. The Hong Kong teams under the mentorship of the Department faculty were awarded an aggregate of 125 gold, silver and bronze medals in APhO and IPhO competitions up to 2021. Participation in Physics Olympics training and competition develops students’ potential and serves as a springboard for pursuing interests in physics and many other subjects at top universities and beyond.    Accompanying photo (left to right) back row: Leung Chun-fung, Lau Sze-chun, Choi Wai-ching, Chan Sze-chun, Cheng Yat-long; front row: Dr Kam-yiu Jimmy Wong (Executive Director of the Hong Kong Academy for Gifted Education), Dr Ting-pong Choy, Prof. Jensen Li, Prof. Kwok-yee Michael Wong, Dr. Tat-ho Lander Lam (Chief Curriculum Development Officer of Education Bureau). Read more

Congratulations to Prof. Che Ting Chan, Prof. Jensen Li, and Prof. Bei Zeng of the Department of Physics for important recognition of their research achievements. Prof. Che Ting Chan was elected Member of the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences (ASHK). The ASHK was founded in 2015 with the purpose to promote the development, advancement, and teaching of science and technology in Hong Kong, to educate and inform the public on issues pertaining to science and technology, and to foster Hong Kong as a centre of scientific excellence. Elected Membership in the Academy represents the highest academic honour in the field of science and technology that Hong Kong peers can bestow. Prof. Jensen Li was elected Member of the Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences (YASHK). Established as a chapter of the ASHK in 2018, the YASHK is comprised of members in their early and mid-career who contribute jointly with the ASHK to the advancement and promotion of science and technology in Hong Kong. Prof. Bei Zeng was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). Prof. Zeng was nominated for this prestigious Fellowship by the Division of Quantum Information, which cited her “For pioneering work and contributions in quantum information science (QIS), including error correction and fault-tolerance, many-body entanglement, quantum tomography, quantum marginals, and QIS applications in quantum matter, and for her long-term contribution to QIS services and education.” The APS Fellowship Program was established to recognize members who have made exceptional contributions to the physics enterprise through outstanding research, leadership or service, or application of physics to science and technology. Each year, no more than 0.5% of the total APS membership is elected for Fellowship after a rigorous and competitive review process.  Read more

Congratulations to Ho Yi Lydia Mak (l) and Xuzixiang Lou (r) for being awarded 2021 Academic Achievement Medals. The Academic Achievement Medal is the highest academic honor bestowed by the University on outstanding undergraduate students upon graduation. The awarding of the Medal was established in 1994 to recognize graduates whose outstanding academic achievements bring honor and distinction both to themselves and to the University. Only the top 2-3% of graduates are awarded the Academic Achievement Medal annually.  These awards are to be presented at the University Congregation in Shaw Auditorium on 27 November 2021. We are proud of all graduates and are especially delighted in the accomplishments of the Academic Achievement Medal awardees.   Ho Yi Lydia Mak is currently pursuing an M.Sc. degree in Geoscience and Remote Sensing at Delft University of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands. Xuzixiang Lou is pursuing an M.Sc. degree in High Energy Physics at ETH Zürich in Zürich, Switzerland.   Read more

Congratulations to Prof. Gyu-Boong Jo, Prof. Jiannong Wang, and Prof. Jingdi Zhang (left to right) in the Department of Physics for important recognition of their research achievements. Associate Prof. Gyu-Boong Jo has been named an RGC Research Fellow by the Hong Kong Research Grant Committee (RGC) in recognition of his outstanding academic and research achievements. Prof. Jo’s selection for the Fellowship was made in support of his cutting-edge work titled “Emulating New Quantum Matter using an Atomic Quantum Simulator with Ultracold Atoms”, in which he controls an ensemble of atoms in a quantum simulator to tackle intractable problems in quantum science.  Chair Prof. Jiannong Wang, who currently serves as the Head of the Department, was elected Fellow of the Physical Society of Hong Kong. The citation for this prestigious honor recognized Prof. Wang “for her groundbreaking discoveries and exploration of semiconductor heterostructures and quantum materials”. Assistant Prof. Jingdi Zhang has been selected to be a recipient of a 2021 NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Scheme (Hong Kong and Macau) Award by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC). This award recognizes Prof. Zhang as one of the most prominent and promising young scientists in Hong Kong and Macau for his innovative use of state-of-the-art time- and energy-resolved ultrafast terahertz spectroscopy to study ultrafast non-equilibrium dynamics in quantum materials by means of light-matter interaction. Read more

Researchers in the Department of Physics proposed a new mechanism for creating and manipulating a net magnetization in an antiferromagnetic material and for achieving this desirable property by static and dynamic control schemes. The discovery of the new mechanism was made by Prof. Junwei Liu and members of his research group in collaboration with Prof Jin-feng Jia’s group at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Prof Wang Yao’s group at Hong Kong University. This discovery will significantly expand existing capabilities to control the magnetization ground state of antiferromagnets. Furthermore, the dynamic control that is made possible by this new mechanism had never been possible before. These breakthroughs have significant importance for future developments in information storage and processing technology. This groundbreaking work was published in Nature Communications 26, 2846 (2021). The new proposed mechanism, called C-paired spin-valley locking (C-paired SVL), can couple an electron’s spin and valley degrees of freedom (DOFs) in antiferromagnets. In contrast to conventional SVL in nonmagnetic materials, such as transition metal dichalcogenides, spin-orbit coupling (SOC) is no longer a necessary condition for producing valley-contrasted spin splitting. This contrast arises instead via the C-paired SVL mechanism from the exchange coupling of itinerant electrons to AFM order. The resulting spin splitting can be very large. Moreover, valleys of opposite spin polarization in an antiferromagnet are paired by a crystal symmetry, instead of the time-reversal symmetry in conventional SVL, to form the emergent quantum degree of freedom. Therefore, both spin and valley DOFs are much easier to access by versatile approaches, such as strain or electric field, that lift the constraint from the corresponding crystal symmetry. In details, one can use a strain to break symmetry between different valleys and hence induce a net static valley polarization and magnetization, and can use an electric field to induce a spin current dynamically that carries a net magnetization, which is an essential ingredient in spintronics device applications. Moreover, the magnetization can be easily manipulated by tuning the direction of strain or electric field. In addition, compared to the conventional spin current in an antiferromagnet with either non-collinear magnetic order or strong spin-orbital couplings, the spin decoherence time facilitated by the C-paired SVL mechanism can be expected to be much longer. This highly desirable property is obtained because spin is still a conversed quantity due to the absence of SOC and the spin-valley locking can significantly suppress the spin decoherence since spin flipping also requires a change of valley index and vice versa. Compared to devices currently in use that manipulate magnetization in ferromagnets to store and manipulate data, devices made of antiferromagnets should be able to achieve much higher storage and processor density and much faster operation speed. However, prior to the discovery of the new C-paied SVL mechanism by Prof. Liu and collaborators, this advantage could not be practically exploited because of the difficulty to create and control magnetization in antiferromagnets. Compared to mechanisms known earlier, which are applicable only to materials with non-collinear antiferromagnetic order or strong SOC, the new mechanism significantly broadens the range of materials that can be manipulated to include the more common collinear antiferromagnets. It also provides unprecedented opportunities to integrate various controls of magnetization and nonvolatile information storage in a single materials, which is highly desirable for versatile research and device applications. Hai-Yang Ma, Mengli Hu, Nana Li, Jianpeng Liu, Wang Yao, Jin-Feng Jia and Junwei Liu, Multifunctional antiferromagnetic materials with giant piezomagnetism and noncollinear spin current, Nature Communications 26, 2846 (2021). Read more

The Department of Physics is proud to welcome three new faculty members: Assistant Professor Berthold Jäck obtained his diploma degree with distinction from Würzburg University, Germany in 2011 and his Dr. sc. in physics from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland in 2015. Prior joining HKUST, he was a postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander-von-Humboldt foundation at Princeton University. His research interest in centered around the microscopic investigation of correlated and topological electronic phases in low-dimensional quantum materials.  Assistant Professor Hoi Chun (Adrian) Po received his Bachelor's degree in Physics at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Ph.D. in Physics at the Harvard University. He was a Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellow in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining HKUST. His main research interest is condensed matter theory, and in particular on the interplay between symmetries and topology in quantum materials. Associate Professor Sen Yang received his Bachelor's degree in Physics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Ph.D. in Physics at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to joining HKUST, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and subsequently at the University of Stuttgart. Most recently, he was also an assistant professor in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interest is quantum optics based on solid-state systems, and in particular developing quantum information technologies with nitrogen vacancy centers in diamond. Read more