News & Events
2016-06-04
Prof Yilong Han received the 14th Chinese Young Scientist Award by the Organization Department of the CPCCC, Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of the PRC and the China Association of Science.
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2016-05-02
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) is hosting the grand physics competition in Asia – the 17th annual Asian Physics Olympiad (APhO) – for the first time in Hong Kong in the largest scale ever. This is also one of the many activities celebrating HKUST’s 25th Anniversary.
APhO is an annual international physics competition organized for high school students in Asia, modeling after the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO). It aims to advance physics education of young people and strengthen interaction and cooperation amongst Asian physics academics, as well as to train and inspire teenagers who are highly talented in physics. In APhO 2016, each participating Asian country or region sends a team of eight secondary school students to contest in the competition, and Hong Kong is allowed to send two teams of representatives to participate in the competition since it is the host city this year. Contestants will take one theoretical and one experimental examination in which innovative physics questions are set by academics at HKUST.
HKUST is dedicated to nurturing science and technology talents. Over the years, the University has been commissioned by the Hong Kong Academy of Gifted Education (HKAGE) for many times to provide a series of enhancement courses in physics to student contestants who represent Hong Kong to take part in APhO and IPhO – nurturing 73 Gold, Silver and Bronze medalists in the two prestigious physics competitions. This year, about 200 secondary school students from 26 Asian countries and regions will compete in the physics contest – the largest scale since APhO was founded in Indonesia in 2000. APhO 2016 was made possible by the generous donations given by the Innovation and Technology Commission as well as Tin Ka Ping Foundation, among others.
APhO was kick-started today in an opening ceremony officiated by Mrs Fanny Law Fan Chiu-fun, GBS, JP, Patron of APhO 2016; Ms Annie Choi Suk-han, Commissioner for Innovation and Technology of the HKSAR Government; Dr Catherine Chan Ka-ki, Deputy Secretary for Education of the HKSAR Government; Prof Tony F Chan, HKUST President and Honorary Chair of APhO 2016; Prof Leong-Chuan Kwek, President of APhO; Prof Tai-Kai Ng, Executive Director of HKAGE; Prof Ruiqin Zhang, President of the Physical Society of Hong Kong; and Prof Lap-Chee Tsui, President of the Academy of Sciences of Hong Kong.
HKUST President Prof Tony F Chan said, “We are delighted to have the opportunity to welcome a big band of young and talented scientific minds to HKUST for the first ever APhO in Hong Kong. It is especially special that this grand event is one of the highlights of our University’s 25th anniversary celebration programs, as promoting research and education in basic sciences is one of our main missions. I hope this special occasion can showcase Hong Kong as a scientific and technological hub of Asia and nurture stronger enthusiasm for physics amongst pre-university students in the region.”
Prof Michael Wong, Professor of Physics at HKUST and Chair of the 17th APhO Organizing Committee, said, “I hope that by the end of this event, all students will go home gaining broader perspectives on latest developments in physics and making lasting international friendships. It is also my conviction that the APhO experience can have life-changing impacts on many of them.”
Besides, Senior Visiting Fellow of the HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study Prof Kam-biu Luk, who received the Breakthrough Prize in 2016 for his measurement of the properties of the mysterious neutrinos, will give two talks titled “Neutrino and Their Properties” and “Fundamental Nature of Matter”.
For more information of APhO 2016, please refer to http://apho2016.ust.hk/index.php.
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2016-04-14
Prof Gyu Boong Jo, Assistant Professor of the Department of Physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), was honored with the prestigious Croucher Innovation Award 2016 by the Croucher Foundation for his distinguished scientific research achievements. The award carries a value of HK$5 million over a span of five years. Prof Rosie Young, GBS, JP, officiated at the award presentation ceremony yesterday.
Prof Jo’s main research area focuses on the realization of synthetic quantum system using ultracold matters, namely a dilute gas of ultracold atoms. To that end, his team adopted the experimental technique from the Atomic Molecular Optical (AMO) physics to control atoms at around 100 billionth of 1 Kelvin above the absolute zero temperature, and made several major discoveries in this field over the past decade. He found ways to preserve the non-classical quantum state for a long coherence time using ultracold atoms, and realized a new family of materials in a complicated crystalline structure called Kagome Lattice, which simulates the traditional Japanese woven bamboo pattern. The findings have not only inspired researchers around the world to continue to characterize this quantum effect in efforts to create better inertial sensors, gyroscopes, magnetometers and gravimeters, but also hold promise for applications in the next-generation information storage and processing.
With the generous support of the Croucher Foundation, Prof Jo plans to implement a high resolution optical microscope in his apparatus to probe further the local property of cold atom samples. “By using a highly controllable synthetic material as a model system, we seek to understand better the many-body system in condensed-matter to unearth more exotic quantum systems that are not available in traditional solid-state materials. This could help discover new materials or systems that may apply in future material science or quantum information science.” he said.
Prof Jo joined HKUST as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics in 2013. After receiving his Bachelor degrees in physics and mathematics from Seoul National University, he continued his PhD in atomic physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was awarded the Samsung Foundation Graduate Fellowship in 2004-2009. He then joined the University of California, Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow from 2010 to 2013. He was the winner of AKPA Outstanding Young Research Award and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council Early Career Award in 2013 and 2014 respectively.
Established in 2012, the Croucher Innovation Awards aim to identify a small number of exceptionally talented scientists working at an internationally competitive level and to offer substantial support to these “rising stars” at a formative stage in their careers. The scheme is designed to enable recipients to pursue their own scientific, intellectual and professional inclinations, to advance their expertise, to engage in bold new work, and to contribute to the development of education and research in Hong Kong. Read more
Prof Jo’s main research area focuses on the realization of synthetic quantum system using ultracold matters, namely a dilute gas of ultracold atoms. To that end, his team adopted the experimental technique from the Atomic Molecular Optical (AMO) physics to control atoms at around 100 billionth of 1 Kelvin above the absolute zero temperature, and made several major discoveries in this field over the past decade. He found ways to preserve the non-classical quantum state for a long coherence time using ultracold atoms, and realized a new family of materials in a complicated crystalline structure called Kagome Lattice, which simulates the traditional Japanese woven bamboo pattern. The findings have not only inspired researchers around the world to continue to characterize this quantum effect in efforts to create better inertial sensors, gyroscopes, magnetometers and gravimeters, but also hold promise for applications in the next-generation information storage and processing.
With the generous support of the Croucher Foundation, Prof Jo plans to implement a high resolution optical microscope in his apparatus to probe further the local property of cold atom samples. “By using a highly controllable synthetic material as a model system, we seek to understand better the many-body system in condensed-matter to unearth more exotic quantum systems that are not available in traditional solid-state materials. This could help discover new materials or systems that may apply in future material science or quantum information science.” he said.
Prof Jo joined HKUST as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics in 2013. After receiving his Bachelor degrees in physics and mathematics from Seoul National University, he continued his PhD in atomic physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was awarded the Samsung Foundation Graduate Fellowship in 2004-2009. He then joined the University of California, Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow from 2010 to 2013. He was the winner of AKPA Outstanding Young Research Award and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council Early Career Award in 2013 and 2014 respectively.
Established in 2012, the Croucher Innovation Awards aim to identify a small number of exceptionally talented scientists working at an internationally competitive level and to offer substantial support to these “rising stars” at a formative stage in their careers. The scheme is designed to enable recipients to pursue their own scientific, intellectual and professional inclinations, to advance their expertise, to engage in bold new work, and to contribute to the development of education and research in Hong Kong. Read more
2016-01-26
Scientists from HKUST and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered a method to observationally distinguish different theories of how the universe first began at its very early stage. The findings were accepted by the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. The expansion of our current universe has been established for almost a century. However, concerning much earlier stages of our universe as how it began has always been a topic of contention among scientists. The most widely-accepted theory of the primordial universe is cosmic inflation, during which the universe was expanding at an extremely fast and mounting rate. On the other hand, there are also contending theories which believe that our infant stage universe was fast contracting, slowly contracting, static or slowly expanding.
While it is known that the above scenarios of how the early stage universe began all exist, there has not been a clear way to distinguish those scenarios from observations. Without a chronological way to label the primordial stages of the universe, scientists could not know whether the primordial universe was expanding or contracting. Prof Yi Wang, Assistant Professor of HKUST’s Department of Physics and his collaborators Prof Xingang Chen and Mohammad Hossein Namjoo from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics note that some heavy particles that are known existing at the birth of the universe can be used as standard clocks; and with the time reference set by the clocks, the primordial stages of the universe can be labeled with time and thus the expansion or contraction history of the primordial universe can be reconstructed.
The research paper proposes that the time of every primordial era can be labeled, such that new observations shall be like a movie, which shows in time order how our universe comes from.
“From observing the oscillation of the massive particles, we are able to reconstruct when fluctuations are created in the primordial universe,” says Prof Wang. “Soon, we may be able to verify the evolutionary history towards how our universe was created, which has remained a myth for so long.”
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While it is known that the above scenarios of how the early stage universe began all exist, there has not been a clear way to distinguish those scenarios from observations. Without a chronological way to label the primordial stages of the universe, scientists could not know whether the primordial universe was expanding or contracting. Prof Yi Wang, Assistant Professor of HKUST’s Department of Physics and his collaborators Prof Xingang Chen and Mohammad Hossein Namjoo from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics note that some heavy particles that are known existing at the birth of the universe can be used as standard clocks; and with the time reference set by the clocks, the primordial stages of the universe can be labeled with time and thus the expansion or contraction history of the primordial universe can be reconstructed.
The research paper proposes that the time of every primordial era can be labeled, such that new observations shall be like a movie, which shows in time order how our universe comes from.
“From observing the oscillation of the massive particles, we are able to reconstruct when fluctuations are created in the primordial universe,” says Prof Wang. “Soon, we may be able to verify the evolutionary history towards how our universe was created, which has remained a myth for so long.”
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2015-12-14
A research team led by Prof Vic Kam Tuen Law, Assistant Professor of the Department of Physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), gave an explanation to the complex phenomenon of superconductivity that survives under strong magnetic field, offering a theoretical answer to an unsolved experimental observation by a group of scientists in the Netherlands. The collective findings were published in Science on 12 November 2015.
Superconductivity is a quantum phenomenon in which electrons form pairs and flow with zero resistance. However, strong enough magnetic field can break electron pairs and destroy superconductivity. When informed by researchers from the Netherlands that superconductivity in thin films of MoS2 could withstand an applied magnetic field as strong as 37 Tesla, Prof Law and his student Mr Noah Yuan came up with an explanation and solved the puzzle.
Prof Law’s team proposed that the lattice structure of MoS2 thin films allows the moving electrons in the material to experience strong internal magnetic fields of about 100 Tesla. This special type of internal magnetic fields, instead of damaging superconductivity, protects the superconducting electron pairs from being destroyed by external magnetic fields. They called this type of superconductors, “Ising superconductors”. They also predicted that many other superconductors, which have similar lattice structure as MoS2, would fall into the same family of “Ising superconductors” as well.
Prof Law’s team also pointed out that Ising superconductors can be used to create a new type of particles called Majorana fermions which would have potential applications in making quantum computers. “Many novel properties and applications of Ising superconductors have yet to be discovered,” Prof Law said. “Now that we understand the mechanism of how certain materials become resistant to interference from external magnetic fields, we can look for materials with similar characteristics to those of superconducting MoS2.” Indeed, in collaboration with experimentalists from Penn State University, Prof Law and collaborators found that a monolayer of NbSe2 is also an Ising superconductor. This work was also published in Nature Physics in November.
Prof Law joined the Department of Physics at HKUST in 2011. He graduated from HKUST in 2003, and received his PhD degree from Brown University in 2008, where he was awarded the Anthony Houghton Award for Theoretical Physics. He was the first joint postdoctoral fellow of HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2008 and became the Croucher Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT in 2009-2011. He was awarded the School of Science Research Award of HKUST in 2014 and the prestigious Croucher Innovation Award 2015 by the Croucher Foundation.
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