News & Events

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.   Read more

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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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.   Read more

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) hosted the first talk of its 25th Anniversary Distinguished Speakers Series yesterday, featuring Prof Steven Chu, Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1997 and former US Secretary of Energy.  The event was well received by students, faculty members and guests from HKUST.
  Speaking on “Energy, Climate Change and the Transition to a Sustainable World”, Prof Chu warned of the impact of climate change on our generations to come. Backing up with statistics and lively examples, he talked about how renewable energy could provide sufficient energy to a greater population.  In order to make the most out of it, Prof Chu noted, a very flexible transmission and distribution system will be required, and that adaptation costs will go down as more parts of the world get used to renewable energy.  “Climate of the earth is indeed changing, and we have very compelling evidence that said it is largely caused by greenhouse gases by humans,” Prof Chu said as he reinstated the need for cleaner energy.   An established physicist and a champion in clean energy, Prof Chu co-won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for a method to cool and trap atoms along with his colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Philips.  He joined US President Barack Obama’s administration as the nation’s Secretary of Energy in 2009, during his tenure he oversaw a tenfold increase in solar energy use and an overall doubling in the use of renewable energy, leading to a cut in fossil fuel consumption.   Prof Chu had recruited outstanding scientists and engineers into the Department of Energy, he also began several initiatives including ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy), the Energy Innovation Hubs and the U.S. – China Clean Energy Research Centers (CERC).  After leaving the public office in 2013, Prof Chu returned to Stanford University and lead researchers in developing accurate, informative and broadly applicable tools for biophysics and biomedicine.   Prof Chu is among five other Nobel Prize winners, corporate leaders, entrepreneurs and key financial policy shapers invited to speak for the Series that marks HKUST’s 25th anniversary.  Other confirmed speakers include Wang Shi, Founder and Chairman of leading property developer China Vanke, winner of Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011 Prof Dan Shechtman, and Dr Raghuram Govind Rajan, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India.  Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Schneider Electric, will be the next speaker for the Series, and he will talk about the new energy world on September 23, 2015.  More talks by other distinguished speakers are also being lined up. Read more

A research team at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), led by Prof Shengwang Du, Associate Professor of Department of Physics, succeeded in controlling photon’s shape, and reached a record photon loading efficiency of 87% into a cavity. The scientific breakthrough can be used to build nodes of a quantum network based on cavity quantum electrodynamics (CQED) and will help advance the development of quantum communication. The research findings were published recently in Physical Review Letters, one of the most prestigious journals in physics.   Half of the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Serge Haroche for his work on CQED. A CQED-based quantum network might consist of flying photonic quantum bits, captured by cavity nodes that perform computations and send information. However, it is not easy to catch and hold a single photon in a cavity. When a photon is injected into a cavity, it can be reflected or transmitted. In previous experiments, reflection and transmission limited the photon loading efficiency to below 20%.   Prof Du and his team exploit the wave-particle nature of a single photon in a cavity between two mirrors—a perfectly reflecting one and an input or output mirror. Using an electro-optical modulator, they shape a photon wave function that, after each round trip in the cavity, interferes destructively with the reflected wave packet. This eliminates most reflections from the cavity while the photon is injected into the cavity.   Prof Du explained that they apply a “heralded” scheme, where a laser-cooled rubidium-atom cloud emits entangled photon pairs, and the detection of one photon heralds the presence of the other one being sent into the cavity. With an optimal exponential-growth photon waveform prepared by the modulator, Prof Du’s team demonstrates a record loading efficiency of 87%, which could advance the development of transmission of quantum information.   Prof Shengwang Du joined HKUST in 2008 and received the School of Science Research Award of HKUST in 2011. He graduated from Nanjing University and obtained a master’s degree in Physics from Peking University. He also received a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University before joining HKUST. Read more

Prof Yilong Han, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) was awarded the 2014 Achievement in Asia Award (AAA) for his distinguished contributions in melting transition, glass transition and the observation of geometrical frustration through creative experiments in colloidal dynamics. The award was shared by Prof Han and Prof Wang Yao, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Hong Kong.   Presented by the International Organization of Chinese Physicists and Astronomers (OCPA), the annual award acknowledges only one or two Chinese scientists below 50 years of age and working in Asia for their outstanding achievements in the field of physics and astronomy. Prof Han will receive his award at the meeting of the American Physics Society in March 2015.   It is the third time for HKUST’s Department of Physics to receive the award. Prof Che-ting Chan, Chair Professor in the Department of Physics, and Prof Ning Wang, Professor in the Department of Physics, were honored in 2000 and 2006 respectively. “I am deeply grateful to be honored with this prestigious award. I hope the crucial experimental inputs will help lead to breakthroughs with great impact in the field of materials physics in the foreseeable future,” Prof Han said.   Prof Han has been devoted to fundamental research in materials physics for 10 years. The particle kinetics in common materials are difficult to measure because individual atoms or molecules are too small, too quick and difficult to observe in bulk. With his research team, Prof Han has for the first time successfully observed homogenous crystal melting at single-particle resolution, closing the long-term debate on alleged defects generated before melting. To explicate this phenomenon, micrometer-sized colloidal particles were used as “big atoms” to simulate the atomic systems, hence obtaining important insights to phase transitions.   The viscosity of supercooled liquid will be increased dramatically by 15 orders of magnitude but with little structural change during its transition to a disordered solid glass state. The glass transition was marked as one of the 125 greatest unsolved mysteries in all disciplines by Science magazine in 2005. Glasses stand for disordered solids which are composed of atoms, molecules, polymers or colloids. Window glass, for example, is composed of silicon oxide. Prof Han and his collaborators investigated colloidal glasses which are composed of ellipsoidal particles and unveiled novel structural signatures of the glass transition.   The research results conducted by Prof Han and his group members, namely Zhongyu Zheng, Ziren Wang, Yi Peng and Feng Wang have recently been published in several renowned scientific journals including Science, Nature, Nature Communications and Physical Review Letters.   Prof Yilong Han joined the Department of Physics in HKUST as an Assistant Professor in 2007 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. He obtained bachelor degree from Peking University in China and a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago, and conducted his postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania in the US. Read more

A group of researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has become the member of a team of physicists from Hong Kong, who has now formally joined one of the most prestigious physics experiments in the world – a top particle physics experiment. Following a unanimous vote of approval today by its Collaboration Board, ATLAS has accepted the Hong Kong team as a member.

The ATLAS Collaboration operates the largest particle detectors in the world. It is located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s highest energy particle accelerator at CERN, Switzerland. In 2012, the ATLAS team – along with the CMS Collaboration – co-discovered the Higgs boson, or the so-called ‘God Particle’. The gigantic but sensitive and precise ATLAS detector, together with the unprecedentedly high collision energy and luminosity of the LHC, makes it possible to search for fundamentally new physics, such as Higgs properties, dark matters, hidden extra dimensions, and supersymmetry – a proposed symmetry among elementary particles. The LHC is currently undergoing an upgrade, targeting a substantial increase in beam energy and intensity by 2015. It is widely expected that the discovery of the Higgs boson is only the beginning of an era of new breakthroughs in fundamental physics. All these exciting opportunities are now opened up to scientists and students from Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong team is led by Prof Ming-chung Chu of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), with members from HKUST, CUHK and The University of Hong Kong (HKU). Other than Prof Chu, the Hong Kong team members include Assistant Professor Luis Flores Castillo (CUHK), Research Assistant Professor Kirill Prokofiev (HKUST), Assistant Professor Yanjun Tu (HKU), four graduate students and two research assistants. Four undergraduate students from the three institutes are also working at CERN this summer. More graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will be recruited to the team shortly.

Prof Michael Altman, Head of Department of Physics of HKUST, said, “Acceptance into the ATLAS team at LHC is a milestone achievement for Hong Kong society that will give our young scientists and students new opportunities to join in making some of the most profound scientific discoveries of our time. It is particularly rewarding to take this great adventure with respected colleagues at other universities in Hong Kong”.

Prof Henry Tye, Director of HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study, is also glad that Hong Kong will participate in this forefront international experiment. He said, “It is particularly great to see that the three universities joint force to make this first step of a long and exciting journey into the unknown.”

The Hong Kong team has recently secured a grant of HK $\$$8.66 million from the Research Grants Council to support its research activities at ATLAS, which include both hardware and software works on the muon detecting system and analysis of data to look for new physics.

In addition, the Hong Kong team has already spent one year working on simulation and testing of hardware, in collaboration with the ATLAS groups at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US. Their previous work has already produced two internal ATLAS technical papers and one open presentation to other ATLAS members.

The ATLAS science program is full of discovery potential, and they will be working together with leading experts from 177 institutes in 38 countries.

The Hong Kong team operates under the umbrella of the Joint Consortium for Fundamental Physics which was formed in 2013 by physicists in the three universities, alongside the elementary particle physics theory and astrophysics and cosmology groups. A theory project led by Prof Gary Shiu of HKUST, complementary to the experimental one, also won support of HK $\$$8.6 million from the Research Grants Council.   Read more

A research team from the Department of Physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has achieved a scientific breakthrough by demonstrating that a two-dimensional superconductivity occurs at the interface between two new classes of materials. The groundbreaking discovery in the emerging field of topological superconductors could advance the development of a practical fault-tolerant quantum computer with unusually high computing power, and data storage abilities. The findings were recently reported in a paper entitled “Two-dimensional superconductivity at the interface of a Bi2Te3/FeTe heterostructure” that was published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.
  The research was carried out by a collaborative team comprised of Prof Iam-keong Sou, Prof Jiannong Wang, Prof Rolf Lortz and Prof Kam-tuen Law together with their postgraduate students and postdoctoral associates. They successfully fabricated two materials, Bi2Te3 and FeTe, using a technique called Molecular Beam Epitaxy. The very rare two-dimensional superconductivity that was discovered at the interface between these two novel materials when they are put together occurs despite the fact that neither of them is itself superconducting.
  Bi2Te3 belongs to a new class of material called “Topological Insulator”, which behaves as an insulator at its interior while its surface is a conductor. FeTe is a parent compound of another new class of material called “iron-based chalcogenide superconductors”. Under certain conditions, a topological insulator can be transformed to a topological superconductor, with the very desirable property that it conducts electricity with no resistance. Theoretical physicists have predicted that a mysterious quasi-particle called the “Majorana fermion” can be trapped and detected in a topological superconductor.   Prof Sou explained that the successful manipulation of Majorana fermions would facilitate a quantum leap in our computational and data storage abilities. He highlighted that conventional semiconductor-based computers in use today have almost reached their physical limits of computing power and data storage capability. A quantum computer based on the superposition principle in quantum mechanics can increase the capability in computing power and data storage tremendously.
  Back in 1937, the Majorana fermion was predicted to exist and has been intensively sought by physicists ever since. A dream computer using Majorana fermions as the basic units is called the topological quantum computer. Majorana fermions are theoretically expected to appear in pairs. Even when one of the paired fermions is modified or damaged, the other could still provide the original information previously stored. This property makes a topological quantum computer very robust against local micro-disturbance and enables it to be fault-tolerant and practical for quantum computation. The topological superconductor developed by HKUST that supports Majorana fermions could lead to the invention of a practical quantum computer.  Read more

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) – a signature program at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to give undergraduate students an early taste of research under the guidance of faculty members, has nurtured many young talented researchers since its launch in 2005.  Year 2 Physics student Ho-tat Lam, champion of the University Research Award this year, will attend two international conferences this summer to share with scholars worldwide his new research findings.

Admitted to the HKUST at the age of 16, Ho-tat began his first research project in the same year and had since then published two research papers under the guidance of his mentor – Prof Kwok-yip Szeto from the Department of Physics.  After his project “Damage Spreading on Network” won 2014 Mr Armin & Mrs Lillian Kitchell Undergraduate Research Award, he went on to study network reliability, and came up with a groundbreaking solution to a decade-old problem that could greatly enhance the reliability of networks such as power grids, internet and social media networking system under limited resources.  He will deliver his findings to an audience of scholars at two academic conferences in Poland and Canada this summer.

“Undergraduates can make significant and original contributions to research as well,” HKUST President Prof Tony Chan said.  “Young students have fresh minds and may propose new approaches that even senior researchers haven’t considered.”

The scale and impact of UROP have grown over the years.  The number of participating students had jumped five times to 353 in the eight years to 2012-13, while the number of faculties who joined the program has more than tripled to 140 during the same period.  There are now 294 UROP projects on offer, up from 65 in 2005.

Prof Michelle Yik, Division of Social Science and Director of UROP, said it was encouraging to see so many students benefited from the program.  “UROP illustrates beautifully the unique feature of research-embedded teaching.  Students are able to take part in faculty-led research in any discipline.”

Six UROP students were awarded in the latest Undergraduate Research Award. The championship went to Physics student Ho-tat Lam, the first runners-up were Hongzi Mao, also a Physics student and Xiao Chen from the Department of Marketing, the second runners-up were Mathematics student Yixin Wang, Economics student Ziyan Chen, and Computer Engineering student Clarissa Cyrilla Prawoto.   Read more