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Asia PacificPhysics Newsletter

published by

Institute of Advanced Studies, Nanyang Technological University (IAS@NTU) and South East Asia Theoretical Physics Association (SEATPA)

South East Asia Theoretical Physics Association

May 2016Volume 5 • Number 2

worldscinet.com/appn

Legend of Abdus Salam1979 Nobel Laureate in Physics

Institute of Advanced Studies

School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences

Supporting Organisations

SPEAKERSTajamal Bhutta Institute of Physics UKPaul Hardaker Institute of Physics UKLeong Chuan Kwek Institute of Advanced Studies, NTUChoy Heng Lai Yale-NUS CollegeHock Lim National University of SingaporeBecky Parker Institute for Research in Schools (to be confirmed)Chorng Haur Sow Institute of Physics SingaporeCharles Tracy Institute of Physics UKMary Whitehouse University of YorkGary Williams Institute of Physics UK (to be confirmed)Proty Wu Jiun-Huei National Taiwan Universityand many others

CO-CHAIRSKok-Khoo Phua Director, Institute of Advanced Studies, NTU

Paul Hardaker Chief Executive, Institute of Physics UK

www.ntu.edu.sg/iasFor enquiries, please email [email protected]

Institute of Advanced Studies @ Nanyang Technological University – Institute of Physics UK Joint Workshop on Physics Education

Envisioning Physics Education for the 21st Century 5 to 6 September 2016Nanyang Executive Centre, NTU

May 2016 • Volume 5 • Number 2 A publication of the IAS@NTU Singapore and SEATPA

Asia Pacific Physics Newsletter publishes articles reporting frontier discoveries in physics, research highlights, and news to facilitate interaction, collaboration and cooperation among physicists in Asia Pacific physics community.

Editor-in-ChiefKok Khoo Phua

Associate Editor-in-ChiefSwee Cheng Lim

SEATPA CommitteeChristopher C Bernido Phil Chan Leong Chuan KwekChoy Heng LaiSwee Cheng LimRen Bao Liu Hwee Boon LowAnh Ký NguyênChoo Hiap Oh Kok Khoo PhuaRoh Suan TungPreecha Yupapin Hishamuddin Zainuddin Freddy Zen

Editorial TeamSen MuChi XiongHui Sun

Graphic DesignersErin OngLing Zhang

Asia PacificPhysics Newsletter

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3 EDITORIAL

COVER STORYMemorial Meeting for Nobel Laureate Prof Abdus Salam's 90th Birthday

Abdus Salam at Imperial College London

Salam's Dream and Dynamic Changes in Chinese Condensed Physics — A Personal Perspective

PEOPLEElucidating the Quantum Structures in Physics — Interview with Nobel Laureate Prof Gerard 't Hooft

Prof David Gross's 75th Birthday Conference in Jerusalem

Unpublished C. N. Yang Interview on Teaching and Research in Physics

ARTICLESSuperconductivity in a Terrestrial Liquid: What Would It Be Like?

Einstein versus the Physical Review

Reflections on the Discovery of Einstein's Gravitational Waves

NEWSRecent News from the Overseas Chinese Physics Association

International Workshop on "Fundamental Science and Society" in Vietnam: Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the "Rencontres de Moriond"

Asia Pacific Physics Newsletter (APPN) is published jointly by Institute of Advanced Studies, Nanyang Technological University (IAS@NTU) and South East Asia Theoretical Physics Association (SEATPA)

IAS@NTU and SEATPAAddress: 60 Nanyang View #02-18Singapore 639673Tel: +65 6513 7660Fax: +65 6794 4941seatpa.orgntu.edu.sg/ias

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AuthorsAPPN welcomes articles with general interests to the physics community. To recommend or contribute news, articles, history, book reviews, please write to: [email protected]

The views expressed in this Newsletter belong to the authors, and do not necessarily represent those of the publishers.

Print ISSN: 2251-158XOnline ISSN: 2251-1598

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Rare Astronomical Event: Partial Eclipse Observation in NUS

Turing Prize Winner Prof Andrew Chi-Chih Yao Explores Development of Quantum Computing

Physics from Iran's Point of View

9th Yukawa-Kimura Prize awarded to Associate Professors Nishimura and Hanada

Report on IPS Award 2015

Joint IAS-ICTP School on Quantum Information Processing

Event Highlights from HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTSHolographic Topological Insulators

Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment

Exploring the Universe in a New Light

Controlling Ultrafast Electrons in Motion

Observation of High Temperature Superconductivity without Effect of Magnetism

Spin Dynamics in an Atomically Thin Semi-conductor

New Spectroscopy of 10ΛBe Hypernucleus Redefines the

Reference Data of Lambda Hypernuclei

OBITUARYChina's Accelerator Physicist XIE Jialin (谢家麟) Dies at Age 96

CONFERENCE CALENDARUpcoming Conferences in the Asia Pacific Region

JOBS

SOCIETIESList of Physical Societies in the Asia Pacific Region

EDITORIAL

3May 2016, Volume 5 No 2

Featured in this May issue of the Asia Pacific Physics Newsletter is the Memorial Meeting for Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam’s 90th Birthday which was held in Singapore this January. The late Abdus Salam was the first Muslim to win the Nobel Prize in Science in 1979. He was the Founding Director of International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy and the Founding President of the Third World Academy of Sciences. Prof Michael Duff (FRS) from Imperial College London shared his personal reminiscences of the legacy of Abdus Salam at Imperial College London. Prof Yu Lu of the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences who spent about 20 years as Head of Condensed Matter Physics at ICTP gave a personal perspective of Salam's dream and dynamic changes in Chinese condensed matter physics.

Nobel Laureate Prof Gerard 't Hooft attended the Memorial Meeting and he shared with us his views on elucidating the quantum structures through an insightful interview. An interesting unpublished interview with Nobel Laureate Prof C N Yang on his teaching and research experi-ence in Physics is also featured. Another highlight is the celebration of Nobel Laureate Prof David Gross' 75th Birthday Conference in Jerusalem. Turing Prize Winner Prof Andrew Yao explored the development of quantum computing in his talk at the HKUST 25th Anniversary Distinguished Speaker Series.

Editor in Chief

Kok Khoo PhuaPresident, South East Asia Theoretical Physics AssociationDirector, Institute of Advanced Studies, Nanyang Technological University

COVER STORY

4 Asia Pacific Physics Newsletter

Memorial Meeting for Nobel LaureateProf Abdus Salam’s 90th BirthdayLars BrinkChalmers Institute of Technology

On 29 January 2016, Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam would have been 90. Unfortunately he passed away far too young almost twenty years ago. Abdus Salam

rose from modest conditions in the little village Jhang in what would become Pakistan to become one of the most important scientists of the last century. After having broken all school records even writing a paper in mathematics, he came to Cambridge to get his PhD in 1951. In 1957, he was called to Imperial College in London as Professor and there he built

up a world leading group in theoretical physics. At the young age of just 33, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

From the beginning, he had a burning interest to help the third world to establish basic science and in 1964, he managed to establish a dream of his: the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, where over the fifty years that it has existed, thousands of young scientists from developing countries have been trained and matured. One cannot overemphasize the importance of ICTP, now properly

Co-Chair Prof Michael Duff (Imperial College London) gave a warm welcome to the participants of the conference.

Nobel Laureate Prof Gerard 't Hooft (Universiteit Utrecht) discussed the Standard Model in his talk.

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Speakers and participants posing for a memorable group photograph.

called The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics. With boundless energy, he travelled the world to speak about the importance of science and in his home country, he set up all the necessary research infrastructure, organizing among other things Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission.

Abdus Salam's contributions to physics are huge. In his thesis, he finalized the proof of renormalization of QED. He later introduced the two-component nature of the neutrino and during the 1960s, he developed gauge theory as the correct framework for the electro-weak theory, a work for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 1979 with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg. He was one of the first to understand the importance of supersymmetry and with Strathdee, he introduced the superfields. Even with his heavy international workload, he was always on top of what happened in particle physics. A proof of his standing is the 44 honorary doctorates that he earned.

A conference to the memory of his 90th birthday was held at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore from 25 to 28 January 2016. Many of his collaborators, students and friends came to

give lectures. Four Nobel laureates, David Gross, Tony Leggett, Carlo Rubbia, and Gerard 't Hooft, participated as well as many other famous physicists. The talks were partly historical. Michael Duff talked about Abdus Salam and his life, career and many of his old collaborators, such as Jogesh Pati, Robert Delbourgo and Yu Lu, interfoliated their scientific talks with reminiscences. Many of Salam's old students gave talks about their present works, such as Peter West, Ali Chamseddine and Qaisar Shafi. One day was devoted to the present situation of particle physics with talks by Peter Jenni, Jim Virdee, Carlo Rubbia, David Gross and Hirotaka Sugawara. ICTP was well represented with talks by the present director Fernando Quevedo, and his predecessor, Miguel Virasoro. Around 120 participants took part in the conference that was held in the Nanyang Executive Centre at NTU.

For more information about the memorial meeting, visit http://www.ntu.edu.sg/ias/upcomingevents/MMAS/Pages/default.aspx

The proceedings cum the memorial book of Abdus Salam will be published by World Scientific.

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Mr Ahmad Salam, son of Professor Abdus Salam, giving a speech at the conference banquet, held at Pan Pacific Hotel, Singapore.

Speakers list for the Memorial Meeting for Nobel Laureate Prof Abdus Salam's 90th Birthday:

- Ahmad Salam (Son of Prof Abdus Salam)- Ahmed Ali The Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) - Francis Allotey African Institute Of Mathematical Sciences- Eric Bergshoeff University of Groningen- Lars Brink Chalmers Institute of Technology- Ali Chamseddine American University of Beirut - Pisin Chen National Taiwan University- Robert Delbourgo University of Tasmania- Michael Duff Imperial College London- Sergio Ferrara CERN- Harald Fritzsch Ludwig Maximilians University- Christian Fronsdal University of California, Los Angeles

- Kazuo Fujikawa RIKEN- David Gross University of California, Santa Barbara- Chris Hull Imperial College London- Tasneem Zehra Husain Theoretical physicist and writer- Peter Jenni CERN- Anthony Leggett University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign- Madumbai S. Narasimhan Indian Institute of Science - Jordan Nash Imperial College London- Jogesh Pati SLAC, Stanford University- Fernando Quevedo International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)- Eliezer Rabinovici The Hebrew University of Jerusalem- Muneer Rashid (contributed speaker)National University of Science and Technology- Carlo Rubbia CERN- Stefano Ruffo International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA)

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Chaired by Prof Lars Brink (fourth from right), the panel discussion on "The Future of Fundamental Physics" included seven prominent scientists, (from left) Profs Pisin Chen (National Taiwan University), Peter Jenni (CERN), Gerard 't Hooft (Universiteit Utrecht), David Gross (University of California, Santa Barbara), Carlo Rubbia (CERN), Tejinder Virdee (Imperial College London) and Hirotaka Sugawara (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology).

- Qaisar Shafi University of Delaware- Kellogg Stelle Imperial College London- Hirotaka Sugawara Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology- Gerard 't Hooft Universiteit Utrecht- George Thompson International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)- Miguel VirasoroNational University of General Sarmiento- Jim Virdee Imperial College London- Spenta Wadia Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

- Peter West King's College London - Lu Yu The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)- Arnulfo Zepeda (contributed speaker)The Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute (Cinvestav)

COVER STORY


Abdus Salam at Imperial College LondonMichael James DuffImperial College London

The death of Abdus Salam in 1996 was a great loss not only for his family and the scientific community; it was a loss to all mankind. For he was not only

one of the finest physicists of the twentieth century, having unified two of the four fundamental forces of nature, but he dedicated his life to the betterment of science and education in the developing world. So although he won the Nobel Prize for Physics, a Nobel Peace Prize would have been equally appropriate.

Salam was born in Jhang, in what is now Pakistan, in 1926, and came from what he himself described as humble beginnings. In fact, “I am a humble man” was something of a catchphrase for Salam, used whenever anyone tried to make physics explanations more complicated than necessary. He attended the Government College in Lahore and Panjab University before setting off for England and St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1946 where he gained a double first in Physics and Mathematics. He gained his PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1952. He returned to Lahore for a few years but was appointed lecturer at Cambridge University in 1954.

Undoubtedly, the greatest influence on Salam at these early stages of his career was his mentor at St. John's, the great Paul Dirac, who remained Salam's hero throughout his life both as a great physicist and as a man who was largely

disinterested in material wealth. Likewise, Salam himself never craved riches, and was known to have paid for poor Third World students and postdoctoral researchers out of his own pocket.

Among Salam's earlier achievements was the role played by renormalisation in quantum field theory when, in particular, he amazed his Cambridge contemporaries with his resolution of the notoriously thorny problem of overlap-ping divergences. His brilliance then burst on the scene once more when he proposed the famous hypothesis that All neutrinos are left-handed, a hypothesis which inevitably called for a violation of parity in the weak interactions. He was fond of recalling the occasion when he submitted (I should say “humbly”) his two-component neutrino idea to the formidable Wolfgang Pauli, whose verdict was: “Give my regards to my friend Salam and tell him to work on something better”, adding that “this young man does not realize the sanctity of parity!”. As a result, Salam delayed publication until after Lee and Yang had conferred the mantle of respectability on parity violation. This experience taught Salam a valuable lesson and he would constantly advise his students never to listen to grand old men (I hope this student, at least, has lived up to that advice!). It also taught him to adopt a policy of publish or perish, and his scientific output, with over 300 publications, was prodigious.

Some personal reminiscences of the legacy of Abdus Salam at Imperial College London, by a former graduate student, delivered at the Memorial Meeting for Nobel Laureate Prof Abdus Salam's 90th Birthday, IAS/NTU Singapore 23-28 January 2016.

When all else fails, you can always tell the truth.

Abdus Salam

COVER STORY


The Theoretical Physics group at Imperial College was founded in 1957 when the then-Head of Physics, Lord Patrick Blackett, persuaded Abdus Salam to leave Cambridge and come to Imperial, notwithstanding attempts by his superiors at Cambridge to retain him. Salam remained Professor of Theoretical Physics until his death in 1996. At the early age of 33, he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society in

1959. In 2007, the anniversary of Salam’s arrival at Imperial was celebrated with the ‘’Salam+50’’ conference.

His work at Imperial included:• Spontaneous symmetry breaking with Gold-stone and Weinberg.• Unitary symmetries with Matthews.• Weak interactions with Ward.• Symmetry breaking with Kibble.• Electroweak unification.

Of course, this was the work that won him the 1979 Nobel Prize which he shared with Glashow and Weinberg, combining several of his abiding interests: renormalisability, non-abelian gauge theories and chirality. His earlier work with Goldstone, Weinberg, Matthews, Ward and Kibble was no doubt also influential.

• Quantum Gravity with Delbourgo, Isham and Strathdee.• Grand Unification

Together with Pati, Salam went on to propose that the strong nuclear force might also be included in this unifica-tion. Among the predictions of this Grand Unified Theory are magnetic monopoles and proton decay: phenomena which are still under intense theoretical and experimental investigation.

• Supersymmetry and superspace with Strathdee.

More recently, it was Salam, together with his lifelong collaborator John Strathdee who first proposed the idea of superspace, a space with both commuting and anticom-muting coordinates, which underlies much of present day research on supersymmetry.

My personal involvements with Salam were:• I was fortunate enough to be his PhD student from 1969 to 1972.

Regrettably, no-one suggested that weak interaction physics would be an interesting topic of research. In fact I did not learn about spontaneous symmetry breaking until after I received my PhD. The reason, of course, is that neither Weinberg nor Salam (nor anyone else) fully real-ized the importance of their model until t'Hooft proved its renormalisability in 1972 and until the discovery of neutral currents at CERN. Indeed, in 1979, the Nobel Committee

COVER STORY


were uncharacteristically prescient in awarding the Prize to Glashow, Weinberg and Salam, as it was not until 1982 that the W and Z bosons were discovered experimentally at CERN.

However, it is to Abdus Salam as the man who first kindled my interest in the Quantum Theory of Gravity (a subject which at the time was pursued only by mad dogs and Englishmen) that I owe a tremendous debt. My thesis title: Problems in the Classical and Quantum Theories of Gravita-tion was greeted with hoots of derision when I announced it at the Cargese Summer School en route to my first postdoc-toral appointment in Trieste. The work originated in a bet between Abdus Salam and Hermann Bondi about whether one could describe black holes using Feynman diagrams. Based on my calculations Salam claimed victory but I never found out if Bondi ever paid up. It was inevitable that Salam would not rest until the fourth and most enigmatic force of gravity was unified with the other three. Such a unification had always been Einstein's dream and it remains among the most challenging tasks in modern theoretical physics and one which attracts the most able and active researchers.

Being a student of someone so bursting with new ideas as Salam was something of a mixed blessing: he would allocate a research problem, and then disappear on his travels for weeks at a time (consequently, it was to Christopher Isham that I would turn for practical help with my PhD thesis). On his return he would ask what you were working on. When you began to explain your meagre progress he would usually say “No, no, no. That's all old hat. What you should be working on is this”, and he would then allocate a completely new problem! After a while, students began to wise up and would try to avoid him until we had achieved something concrete. Of course, the one place that could not be avoided was the

men's room, so that was frequently the location for receiving your new orders.

• First postdoctoral appointment in Trieste 1972-1972• Faculty colleague in the Theoretical Physics Group 1979-1988• Abdus Salam Professor of Theoretical Physics, 2005-2015

These scientific achievements reflect only one side of Salam's character. He also devoted his life to the goal of international peace and cooperation, especially to the gap between the developed and developing nations. He firmly believed that this disparity would never be remedied until Third World countries become arbiters of their own scien-tific and technological destinies. This means going beyond mere financial aid and the export of technology; it means the training of a scientific elite capable of discrimination in all matters scientific. He would thus vigorously defend the teaching of esoteric subjects such as theoretical elementary particle physics against critics who complained that the time and effort would be better spent on agriculture. His establishment of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste was an important first step in this direction. He served as President of the Third World Academy of Sciences, and was hotly tipped as the Director of UNESCO until ill-health forced him to withdraw his candidacy. He also acted as chief scientific advisor to the President of Pakistan. His visionary insights into the urgent need for science and technology in the Third World are set out in his book Ideals and Realities.

I will not list his numerous awards but must mention the Atoms for Peace Prize (1968), the Einstein Medal (1979) and the Peace medal (1981). He holds honorary degrees from over 40 universities worldwide and received a Knighthood for services to British Science in 1989.

Another aspect of Salam's thinking was that he remained a devout Muslim all his life. Unfortunately, this is the side of his character on which I am the least qualified to comment, except to say that he took it all very seriously. On a lighter note, the evening of the Nobel ceremony was memorable in that Salam arrived attired in traditional dress: bejewelled turban, baggy trousers, scimitar and those wonderful curly shoes that made him appear as though he had just stepped out of the pages of the Arabian Nights. The net result, of course, was that he completely upstaged Glashow and Weinberg (which I suspect may not have displeased him!).

It is indeed a tragedy that one as vigorous and full of life

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as Abdus Salam should have been struck down with such a debilitating disease. He had such a wonderful joie de vivre and his laughter, which most resembled a barking sea-lion, would reverberate throughout the corridors of the Imperial College Theory Group. When the deeds of great men are recalled, one often hears the cliche “He did not suffer fools gladly”, but my memories of Salam at Imperial College were quite the reverse. People from all over the world would arrive and knock on his door to expound their latest theories, some of them quite bizarre. Yet Salam would treat them all with the same courtesy and respect. Perhaps it was because his own ideas always bordered on the outlandish that he was so tolerant of eccentricity in others; he could recognise pearls of wisdom where the rest of us saw only irritating grains of sand. One such was the young military attaché from the Israeli embassy in London who showed up one day with his ideas on particle physics. Salam was impressed enough to take him under his wing. The young man was Yuval Ne'eman and the result was flavor SU(3).

Let me recall just one example of a crazy Salam idea. In that period 1969-72, one of the hottest topics was the Veneziano Model and I distinctly remember Salam remarking on the apparent similarity between the mass and angular momentum relation of a Regge trajectory and that of an extreme black hole. Nowadays, of course, string theorists will juxtapose black holes and Regge slopes without batting an eyelid but to suggest that black holes could behave as elementary particles back in the late 1960s was considered preposterous by lesser minds. As an interesting historical footnote, let us recall that at the time, Salam had to change the gravitational constant to match the hadronic scale, an idea which spawned his strong gravity; today the fashion is the reverse and we change the Regge slope to match the Planck scale!

Theoretical physicists are, by and large, an honest bunch: occasions when scientific facts are actually deliberately falsified are almost unheard of. Nevertheless, we are still human and consequently want to present our results in the best possible light when writing them up for publication. I recall a young student approaching Abdus Salam for advice on this ethical dilemma: “Professor Salam, these calculations confirm most of the arguments I have been making so far. Unfortunately, there are also these other calculations which do not quite seem to fit the picture. Should I also draw the reader's attention to these at the risk of spoiling the effect or should I wait? After all, they will probably turn out to be irrelevant.”. In a response which should be immortalized in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Salam replied: “When all else fails, you can always tell the truth.”.

As Robert Walgate remarked in the New Scientist in 1976, “Salam is a cultural amphibian. He has the heart of a poet and the mind of a scientist. He is an excellent physicist concerned with deep patterns; he is also a deeply compassionate man. These two threads intertwined throughout his life.”.

I think it was Hans Bethe who said that there are two kinds of genius. The first group (to which I would say Steven Weinberg, for example, belongs) produce results of such devastating logic and clarity that they leave you feeling that you could have done that too (if only you were smart enough!). The second kind are the “magicians” whose sources of inspiration are completely baffling. Salam, I believe, belonged to this magic circle and there was always an element of Eastern mysticism in his ideas that left you wondering how to fathom his genius.

Acknowledgments:

I am grateful to my conference co-organizers K.K. Phua and Lars Brink for affording me this opportunity to pay homage to Abdus Salam.

COVER STORY


Salam’s Dream and Dynamic Changes in Chinese Condensed Matter Physics— A personal perspectiveLu YuInstitute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Professor Abdus Salam deeply believed that ‘scientific thought is the common heritage of all mankind’ and had the dream that the developing world could

contribute equally to that heritage. I was fortunate to work directly under his supervision for 10 years at the Interna-tional Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, founded and directed by him. I could witness personally how he devoted his wisdom, energy, heart and soul to materialize this dream for the developing word. I could also witness how his dream was coming true, at least partially, in some parts of the South, including China, although the path was not straightforward, full of challenges and difficulties.

A half-century ago, modern condensed matter physics was almost nonexistent in China. However, during the past 30 years, especially since the beginning of the 21st century, the situation has changed dramatically. A number of outstanding young physicists from China with cutting edge research achievements now have global recognition. How did this quantal transition occur?

In the late 50s and early 60s about 8000 young Chinese scientists were trained in the former Soviet Union (SU) for the Diploma or PhD. degrees. I was fortunate to be one of them and was appointed a group leader at the Institute of Physics (IoP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, after returning, even though I did not have a PhD. The lack of experience and scientific exchange was partially made up by intensive self- and mutual- education. A group of almost starving young people passionately studied and disputed the latest results in the literature (fortunately, scientific journals were available at IoP). Under that encouraging environment I

started my own research work and could make a prediction of the bound states inside the energy gap of superconductors doped with magnetic impurities. I am very pleased that the ‘big exercise’ made in the early years of my career still remains pertinent for the current hunting of the Majorana fermions, anticipated at the interface of superconductors and topological insulators.

Unfortunately, that joyful time did not last long. In 1966 the ‘Cultural Revolution’ broke out in China, and normal research/education activities were almost completely stopped. In 1969, I was sent to the countryside to do manual labor, to be ‘re-educated’ by farmers. Research work was out of the question under those conditions.

Nevertheless, something magical happened after I returned from the countryside in 1971. Following the

Prof Lu Yu at the "Memorial Meeting for Nobel Laureate Prof Abdus Salam's 90th Birthday" held in January 2016 at Nanyang Technological University.

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‘Ping-Pong’ diplomacy (exchange of table-tennis players between the US and China) and Richard Nixon’s visit, the atmosphere in China changed a bit. We could get some infor-mation on the breakthrough in the study of phase transitions and critical phenomena. Again, through uneasy efforts of intensive self- and mutual-education, we could catch up the latest developments, performed some sophisticated calcula-tions of the critical exponents and showed those results to members of the American delegation of Solid State Physics, who came to visit China in 1975.

The scientific exchange during the ‘Cultural Revolu-tion’ was rather limited, but it was crucial for our scientific survival and for research continuity. The personal contacts established then were extremely helpful for recovering our scientific career and building-up successful international collaboration after China’s opening up to the outside world.

I was invited by Abdus Salam and Stig Lundqvist from Sweden to join the ICTP staff in 1986, with a heavy-weighted letter from Abdus Salam saying: ‘We would like the Condensed Matter activities in developing countries to be enhanced through your presence here at the Centre.’ … ‘We all look forward to a second revolution in condensed matter activity in developing countries with your appointment and through your influence.’ One can imagine how much pressure and drive was there for me from this kind of anticipation.

The ICTP and its sister organization, the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), have played a tremen-dous role in promoting science and education in developing countries, especially after China suffered badly from isolation and destructions during the ‘Cultural Revolution’. Thousands of young Chinese scientists visited ICTP-SISSA as postdocs, trainees in the Italian laboratories, associate members, participants of schools/conferences, and many of them used it as a stepping stone to the broad international arena. During my tenure at ICTP (lasting almost 17 years), I did my best, under Salam’s supervision and following his advice, and that token contribution was well recognized by international colleagues. I was awarded the 2007 AIP (American Institute of Physics) John T. Tate Medal for International Leadership in Physics, established for non-Americans. Abdus Salam also received the same award earlier, in 1978. I felt greatly honored and pleased, as I was trying very hard to follow his steps.

In 2002 I returned back to China after retirement from ICTP. Instead of enjoying a relaxed pensioner’s life, I have still been actively involved in research related activities. However, my role changed dramatically: no longer as a research leader or a science organizer, but rather as a senior adviser, a friend for researchers of different age groups, and a ‘cheerleader’. In that position I personally witnessed the

dramatic changes in Chinese science, and in condensed matter physics, in particular.

At the end of February 2008, I was invited by Nanlin Wang at IoP to join their group meeting, where the latest report (in Japanese) of Hosono group’s discovery of 26K iron pnictide superconductors was discussed. In less than a week, the first paper written by Wang’s group appeared in arXiv, giving rise to the wave of research on iron-based high temperature superconductivity worldwide. Soon afterwards several Chinese groups followed up, pushing the supercon-ducting temperature to the highest record, as commented in Science, ‘New superconductors propel Chinese physicists to the forefront’.

This was one of the recent examples. Similar situa-tion was repeated in the studies of topological insulators, the quantized anomalous Hall effect, as well as the Weyl fermions/Weyl semi-metals. In fact, among the Top 10 Breakthroughs in 2015, selected by Physics World of the European Physical Society, two were from China, the leading breakthrough ‘Double quantum teleportation milestone in Physics’ by Jianwei Pan’s team and the Weyl fermions. I know well the research team on Weyl fermions: theoreticians made precise prediction in which materials these fermions should be looked for, the material scientists synthesized these compounds after many unsuccessful attempts, while the experimentalists measured the photoemission spectra to confirm the anticipated physical properties on the most advanced facilities. Theory--material synthesis--characteri-zation, three-in-one, in close, organic collaboration -- a new productive paradigm appeared.

Surely, these tremendous changes did not come out of blue: strong government support (the budget of National Science Foundation (NSF) of China has been increasing by 10-15% annually for the last 10-15 years, the R&D budget was beyond 2% of GDP in 2014), the large inflow of well-trained scientists (more than 5000 for the last 10 years), the substantial improvement in research facilities, the consolida-tion of the research community, and fruitful international collaborations are the key prerequisites for materializing the quantal transition.

Abdus Salam said in 1985, at the inauguration confer-ence of the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), a partner organization of ICTP, also created by him,: ‘…young men and women from the Third World …enviously, and deservedly, long to participate in this exciting adventure of scientific creation on equal terms.’ I would like to report to Professor Salam that his dream is being materialized, at least partially, now!

PEOPLE


You are a theoretical physicist. What intrigues you about this field in the first place?

When I was a child, I was very interested in natural phenomena, in physics and mathematics – beginning with numbers. Part of this was also due to my family background. My grandfather was a well-known zoologist. My grand uncle was a Nobel Laureate in physics. My uncle, whom I was very close with at the time, was a highly respected physicist in Netherlands. So I could ask him all my questions. The more he tried to answer by saying, “You are too young. You have to go to the university” – the more eager I was to learn what it was all about. I was always interested in fundamental questions – how the laws of nature really work, what we can do to understand them, what we can do to build nice gadgets. Radios, satellites, and space travel, all these things have now become possible. Of course, physics is a major ingredient of these inventions. From early on, I knew I wanted to learn about the basic stuff, to understand what was really going on.

Elucidating the Quantum Structures in Physics — Interview with Nobel Laureate Prof Gerard ’t Hooft

Professor Gerard ’t Hooft is a Dutch theoretical physicist at Utrecht University, the Netherlands and the 1999 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics. He has made many important contributions on gauge theories in particle physics, quantum gravity and black holes and fundamental questions in quantum mechanics. Besides the Nobel Prize shared with Martinus Veltman for “elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interaction in physics”, he was awarded many notable awards including Heineman Prize (1979), Wolf Prize (1981), Lorentz Medal (1986), Spinoza Prize (1995), Franklin Medal (1995) and Lomonosov Gold Medal (2010). He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science since 1982 and a foreign member of other science academies such as the French Academy of Sciences, the American National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences and The Britain and Ireland based Institute of Physics.

Considering the influence that your family had on you, would you encourage your own children to continue this course?

Yes, but only if they really feel attracted to this kind of science, which is always a combination of environmental factors, with a little genetic ingredient, I guess. I knew before I could talk that I wanted to understand the physical world. I started to talk quite late, not until I was 3. My parents were worried about this. My grandmother was always encouraging me. She liked the idea of being busy with your mind, being different from others, being absorbed into something. It doesn’t have to be physics - her husband was a zoologist; her other brother was a chemist. There was a lot of academic activity in the family. I have two daughters. Of course I wanted to talk to them about physics, but they were not really interested. One of my daughters once said that a physicist is someone who sits there with a blank piece of paper, not talking to anybody and staring for two hours at the blank paper – that was me

Yuyang Cai & Chi XiongNanyang Technological University, Singapore

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of course. Before I do a calculation, I need to have clearly in my mind what I want to understand. I told them that what I wanted them do to is to search for themselves what is it that they are really interested in, and in what way they could be special. You don’t want to be just like all the others. You want to have some specialty that’s ‘your thing’, your subject, and you want to be good at it. This worked out well for both of them, but they didn’t go into physics.

You set out to be a ‘man who knows everything’ as a child. Do you think you have reached there?

Yes and no. Of course the whole topic of science is much too large. In the Stone Age, it may have been a good start for someone to say he wants to understand everything as much as possible. But we are no longer in the Stone Age. There are thousands of scientists, specializing in all different topics - that is the body of science. I did not only want to become part of it, I wanted to make my own discoveries. In that respect, I think I have been fairly successful. I did find new features of the physical world. Also there are things that I’m not really being credited for, in the sense that people and the community at large have other opinions about what is the best approach than my personal ideas. Still, I think personally I’ve found several things, features that help to understand the world of very tiny particles, the universe and the forces there. I partly succeeded, but I cannot say that I know everything at all. There is very much to be known.

What goals do you have at this stage of life?

I know that I’m no longer as productive as I used to be, but I still think that I have very good intuition. That allows me to say that I don’t agree with what some people are doing, and that there are better approaches. I have my own ideas which to my mind are superior. Whether this is actually true remains to be seen. My intuition is that the way I approach things eventually will bear fruit. I plan to continue with that as long as I can. I don’t know how long I can continue doing my own research, but as long as I have the ability to do something, I’ll continue.

Is it fair to say that the theory of general relativity or the black hole doesn’t have much direct applications in our daily life?

No, I wouldn’t say that. Maybe in three ways these theories do affect people. One is that general relativity has direct influence on machines such as GPS that need corrections from general relativity, but that’s not the main thing. General

relativity also becomes important if you realize that things in the universe, like heavy stars and black holes, show behavior that you can only understand with general relativity. Furthermore, you can use gravitational waves, not yet now but in the near future to find new information about heavy objects in the universe, for instance black holes, which we only understand properly if we understand how general relativity works.

Now there are two other things, one is the applications in neighboring fields. Perhaps direct applications of GR are not tremendously big in science. Most topics in science do not really need general relativity to understand them. You don’t really have to know all the details of general relativity to understand how a star works. However, general relativity has shown the generic structure of how a force can arise. We notice that the basic feature that makes a force work is curvature of space and time. Now the concept that forces can arise by having some sort of intrinsic curvature, has been used by Yang and Mills, who realized that we can use principles very similar to general relativity more generally in particle physics, which led to their theory. They noticed that there was a basic similarity between electromagnetism and general relativity in that these both need some local gauge fixing. In the case of general relativity it is the coordinate transformation while in the case of electromagnetism that is the gauge transformation. There are many similarities in these two theories and so they realized that if that’s the situation, maybe other forces exist that are based on the same principles, and that could also act as forces between particles. Thus they discovered the Yang-Mills theory, today a very important, essential ingredient in all of particle physics. Today we cannot understand particles without these Yang-Mills forces. It was fairly directly derived from general relativity, or at least general relativity was the big prototype of a force based on geometric structures; and Yang-Mills theory is based on the same idea. Yang-Mills theory is very important in the subatomic world. Without it you wouldn’t understand how a nucleus really works.

The third important thing is simply the fantastic way nature challenges us, to figure out how things work; general relativity is a marvelous mathematical structure. It forces us to think very precisely, how to solve complicated mathematical equations using approximations. You can find only a handful of exact solutions whereas everything else can be solved approximately. We have to understand what it means to make an approximate solution in general relativity and this is a big intellectual challenge for mankind. An even greater intellectual challenge comes when one tries to combine particle physics with general relativity. The very

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tiniest structures in nature that can exist are not properly understood, and properly understanding them would require general relativity, particle physics and quantum mechanics all combined. This forces us to consider everything that exists in the universe, put it all together and turn it into the grand synthesis called Grand Unified Theory. This has not yet been achieved and I think that the reason for this is that humanity hasn’t been able yet to grasp this enormous challenge. Thousands of people are tied to it but they all have their intellectual limitations. They’re only humans and you have to be superhuman to understand the whole problem as one unity. This is such a marvelous challenge lying in front of us, that many of my colleagues cannot leave it there. They see the problem, they see quantum mechanics, general relativity, the universe and cosmology, and, like I do myself, they realize that we must be dealing with one grand structure of something. How to formulate such a grand structure? A mathematician only needs equations and then expects to be asked how to solve the equations. But in physics, you don’t understand the solutions, because you don’t understand the equations. Find the equations, find why the solutions are relevant and try to understand the world we live in this way. This is an enormous challenge and I suspect that you need some, say, computer intelligence to solve the problem because humans are too restricted.

If we want to promote the physics research in Singapore, how would you convince the people from the National Research Foundation to do research in physical science?

I think you should capture people’s imagination and show how physics, or science in general, has transformed the whole world society into what it is now. We have airplanes, automo-biles, phones, GPS, television and all such. The information technology has modified the world. When I grew up there was no internet, there were no mobile phones, and these have completely changed our world. The whole world has become a village, we can all contact each other no matter how far away we are from each other. That’s an enormous change. What about science? I think our message should be clear, I see a lot of science in our future that will continue to change this world. I think we are just at the very beginning of the information revolution; it will go a lot beyond what we see now. We’ll have intelligent computers and they’ll look at us and say “A person. I think I know what your problem is and I’ll solve it for you.” That kind of developments, although still in the distant future, will change our society even more completely than what has happened in the past.

We see that science is progressing forward at a speed faster than ever before. New observations and discoveries are brought to surface every day. What is your prediction on physics in 50 years?

That’s hard to say. The problem of quantizing gravity is bound to be solved, and I think it will be solved. We will understand how to do gravity correctly, I don’t see why not. This is a theoretical problem. We are getting there and I think we know much more than 30 or 40 years ago about this topic. I cannot see why there should be any fundamental barrier. This is only one of many theoretical questions. As for experi-ments, we see nearly every day that people do, or suggest to do things that have never been done before. Thinking of the large astronomical telescopes in high mountains and outer space, you will see telescopes of kilometers in size, creating images much sharper than anything in existence today. We will know other planets in our neighborhood, and around other stars, and we will learn how the universe works, how galaxies cluster and shape. We will understand the universe much more precisely than today. I think these things will happen, not always as quickly as planned, but we will eventu-ally succeed and get humans to populate the solar system. Science will continue to transform our society.

It took almost 50 years from the establishment of the Standard Model to the discovery of the Higgs particle. Is the pace of physics development slowing down compared with what it was 50 years before?

I hope you are wrong. I still believe that the twentieth century was the golden age of science. Imagine the beginning of the twentieth century, what changes have taken place since. Before the twentieth century there were a lot of sciences developing, and there will be sciences after the twentieth century. But the twentieth century is the golden age, where we saw an exponential growth in scientific activities. I hope it is not the end yet. I hope the twenty-first century will be comparable to the twentieth, but I have fears that it will not be going as fast as one might want. Some people say that once the computers become smarter than humans, there will be great accelerations. Will this happen or not? Some people say it will. Science will be done exclusively by computers. I have no way to foresee what that will bring us.

I read that you are an ambassador for the 'Mars One' project which is planning manned trips to the surface of Mars. What’s your vision for the project and what could be the implication for the future of human beings?

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My first reaction, probably like everybody else’s, was that I told these guys: ‘you are simplifying things far too much. This is much more difficult than you think it is’. I still believe that is true, but what I did appreciate is that they investigated every aspect, not only how to make a space ship, and how to make air and water from what you have on Mars, but they also thought about how to earn the money to make such a trip, how many people you can send, how they are going to feed themselves, how they can live together for so long. One of the conclusions they drew is that the return trip will be much harder, much more expensive, and much more dangerous than the trip towards Mars. “So”, they decided, “we can offer a one-way trip, but not a return”. Therefore the sensible idea was that people who go must be completely aware that they will not be coming back. They will need to make life reasonably comfortable for these people and reasonably diverse. My problem with this project is that it’s still presented as being simple. The dangers are much bigger than they seem to realize. I see some fundamental hurdles and obstacles that I think will hold them back much more than they realize now. Yet the idea of having made such extensive considerations – I like it very much. I think in the distant future, there will be people on Mars living in colonies. This will only be possible with further advances in science, whereas my friends here think they don’t need to invest in science – they want to use what’s known today. What’s known today should be sufficient to get to Mars. This may be true on paper, but life will then be very harsh – I think it will be too difficult for me to stay alive out there. Today, although it is in principle possible to go to Mars, I think it is still too dangerous; there are too many unsecure factors.

I know that a lot of other hurdles and obstacles will be encountered, that will make the trip much more expensive, and the project will keep being postponed for many more years. But as I said, I don’t care about that so much. I like the whole idea of making explorations – go on with it, and see how far you get. Maybe you don’t actually make it to Mars, but you’ve made the best attempt by far. You’ve made out a plan. Maybe the plan doesn’t succeed, but there will be new generations who understand what you’ve missed, and they will start from there.

For instance, the idea that was suggested, is to build some simple pre-fabricated houses, like balloons and domes, in which you live. But other investigators think it’s better to look for natural caves on Mars. Living underground provides much better protection against radiation, leaks and meteor-oids. If you can live inside a cave, that may actually be more interesting also. Anyway this requires more science and more time. So that may be a next generation of plans. Now just let

this continue and see how far it gets. This whole project to me is an interesting scientific experiment all by itself. Can one build, and maintain, an artificial ecosystem on a place like Mars? It will be very difficult. But it should be possible.

I came across your website on ‘how to become a good theoretical physicist’ and it is a really comprehensive site. How much work did it take to put together such a wealth of information and what’s your vision for it?

Oh that wasn’t too much work because I’ve been teaching theoretical physics for a long time, so I know which subjects you need to know to become a theoretical physicist. If you have studied them all and understood what they are all about, you can become a theoretical physicist. I get many questions from outsiders saying: “I know nothing about mathematics, but I want to read theoretical physics”. If you don’t know mathematics, first step is to study that because you do need it. People ask such questions all the time. Now I have this webpage, so that I can say, go to this page and see what you need. People also ask, I’m from a developing country. I don’t have access to university, or, I’m old. What should I do? My first response is, try very hard to get to a university because it forces you to learn things that you don’t want. You think they are unnecessary, but that is often not true. The things you think are unnecessary are actually part of the education you need to understand. If you go by yourself, you will be tempted to skip the things you don’t want and that is probably not a good idea.

Do you believe someone will be so serious as to finish them all?

I get very positive feedback for the website. People say, “It’s changing my life, because now I know what I need to do.” Of course, the site reflects my own opinion. You don’t have to follow my opinion. Some people say that’s a lot of work. Yes it is a lot of work. If you want to be a good football player, a pianist, or an artist, you also have to invest in yourself. This is a kind of investment.

Can someone really become a theoretical physicist even after studying all the notes?

I think only super humans can do that. Normal people will encounter problems, of all sorts. They may not have enough money to sustain themselves while doing the study. They may also hit on problems of understanding. If they don’t understand exactly what is being said in the lecture notes, then they could go off in the wrong direction. We’ve seen

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quite a few very intelligent people nevertheless at some point go off in the wrong direction, and they are no longer promising scientists. So university is very important. The first thing I try to persuade people to do is to enter somehow into a university. If you really can’t, the website will roughly tell you what theoretical physics is all about. But start with using only these pages and nothing else. Of course you have the whole internet, but you don’t see very often that people can do very hard things by just surfing the internet – there are too many distractions on the internet. If you know where to look, you will find very good sites and you can learn a lot, but you will also find sites where people got it totally wrong – these are usually the shouting people. If you are not sufficiently well prepared, you might fall in any of these traps.

David Gross and Edward Witten just wrote an essay on WSJ about China’s plan of building the “Great Collider”. If the project evaluation committee asks for your opinion, what do you want to say to them?

I am very much in favor of this project in China, if for nothing else then for the new competition they will provide. At CERN, physicists are also dreaming of making an 80 kilometer circle, so they can quadruple the energy at LHC today. They will then have a new accelerator. But if the new accelerator has no competition, it will take ages to complete. For instance, in the last couple of years Fermilab gave a strong drive for LHC not to slow down because LHC was hitting its own problems, postponed by a year and then another year so it became operational much later than planned. People were concerned that Fermilab may discover the Higgs particle first. One major concern for CERN was that they might be too late, so they should better hurry up. And so, they worked very hard to get LHC ready in time and they did find the Higgs particle. So this is kind of a race. Science flourishes when there is competition, like the space competition in the Cold War, about who will get to the moon first. Without the Cold War, this would not have happened, and there would still have been nobody on the moon today. So the whole idea of China just mentioning that they might make an accelerator already spins things up. Now at CERN, they are thinking very hard about the next generation accelerator and how to continue to keep science alive, because after 20 years LHC will no longer produce anything new. It will have done its job. CERN must do something else. If there is no competition, it will take ages to build the new machine. Now the Chinese may get what they need to make new discoveries at 40 TeV or 100 TeV, a good motivation to CERN to push it. So I like the idea of having more competition in this field.

What do you expect to be discovered at such large colliders?

Well that’s the whole point. If we knew what will be discov-ered we wouldn’t need to build such a machine. We need it because we don’t know what to expect. For a long time people were completely sure that the Standard Model will break down. The questions are where and how it will break down, what will be the new ingredients and fundamental building blocks, like new kinds of quarks, new objects inside the quarks and so on. The most popular way is to search for supersymmetry and detect signs of superstring theory being the way to look at things. There are some more novel kinds of theories but one option that people usually don’t take into consideration is that the Standard Model, for a very long time, may continue to be basically the final word, and there will be no extensions to the Standard Model for quite some orders of magnitude of scales. It is conceivable, still not very likely, but it is not impossible. If it is really discovered that the Standard Model comes out without scratches, it will be the problem of the Standard Model. The Standard Model itself is not a perfect mathematical construction. There are weaknesses in the whole concept. If we find out nothing else, then nature itself will have different answers. It is a very strong model, but this means that you have to work out the Naturalness Problem. Very likely this has to do with the gravitational force. Many of us do believe that if we attempt to put gravity in, everything will change.

Is that true that you have actually found asymptotic freedom or the scaling properties of the Yang-Mills theories, e.g. QCD, but didn’t publish the result?

This history is very complicated. I was not the first, not the last. There was a Russian physicist, (Iosif Khriplovich), who made similar remarks but was ignored. With hindsight, we can roughly reconstruct what has happened. People couldn’t imagine that theories such as QCD would be asymptotically free, because QCD is not more special than a scalar theory, or theories with just fermions and scalars, or fermions and abelian vectors. Why should non-abelian vector fields be so special? If at all scales everything has the same sign, it indi-cates that the theory will destroy itself at short distances. To such extent, that nothing works anymore at short distances. This became the prevailing view: quantum field theory itself is carrying its own seed of destruction.

It was rather mysterious as to why QCD is asymptotically free. It has to do with strong magnetic forces and colour magnetism being the dual opposite of colour electricity. The

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Yang-Mills gauge particles have large magnetic moments, and these magnetic moments act in the other direction, making the theory asymptotically free. This is highly non-trivial and was not expected. When Landau first asked the question about the scaling of the theory of QED (I am not sure if this story is confirmed, not in any books), his first calculation had a sign error. So he thought QED is asymp-totically free. Some student pointed out the sign error and Landau was so furious that he thought that quantum field theory is a mess. My advisor Veltman looked into the experi-mental data and found that the weak interaction behaves like a Yang-Mills theory. He thought there must be something good about Yang-Mills theory and asked the question about its renormalizability. In the West, people like Murray Gell-Man had basically made the same observation as Landau but didn’t make the mistake. He thought maybe there is a limit to the definition of the strong coupling constant and there is a fixed point. I never had much confidence in such a theory because the fixed point is in the strong interaction domain and the theory is difficult to handle, so you have a theory based on very sloppy mathematics, and I don’t like it. Symanzik thought those fermions and gauge fields only make things more complicated, a scalar theory should show it all. But scalar theories are not asymptotically free, so I suggested that he should look into the Yang-Mills theory, but Symanzik didn’t believe that. Thus, both the East and the West, although they do physics in different ways, were convinced that no theories are asymptotically free. Some people concluded that a theory should not be based on

perturbative expansions at all. If that is the way nature works, then I don’t want to be a physicist anymore because I do want to do perturbation expansions.

When I was a young student I didn’t know all these papers and didn’t quite understand why people were so hostile towards quantum field theory. The Yang-Mills theory was in the beginning of its formulation and I studied the Yang-Mills theory and asked the question how does it scale. The scaling was fine and asymptotically free (I didn’t use the word), but I didn’t realize that I was the only one who had done the calculation at that time (1971). People like Symanzik didn’t believe it, and he told me that if what I said is true, I should publish it immediately. But I got hooked to do something else and postponed my publication. Veltman told me that if I have a theory for strong interactions I should explain why quarks don’t come out. Then the large-N expansion came along, which showed that planar diagrams dominate at large N. Gross, Wilczek and Politzer did the calculation and had the right idea of publishing it, and to formulate the conclusion that this must be related to understanding why quarks do not come out.

Do you think the new generation of university students today is any different from when you were in university?

I think science has grown enormously. When I was a graduate, there were many undergraduate students at our institute, but only a handful of graduate students, just only 5 or so in my field. We all knew each other. There was no divide yet in particle physics and statistical physics – it was all called theoretical physics. Now the department has become so big that you don’t know all the other students any more, let alone the undergraduates. Also another big difference is the urge to get your thesis ready within 4 years. In the old days, many of my friends took much more than that to produce their thesis. The whole point is that the thesis has to be a good thesis. If you need to take more than 4 years, so be it. Now it’s an institutionalized problem. There are rules that don’t allow you to take more than 4 years. That’s a short amount of time considering the level you had to start off from. First you have to learn the subject, learn the problems and come up with solutions. That is very a tough assignment, and today it’s even harder than the old days because our field of science has grown enormously. You have to specialize much earlier and in a much narrower domain of science in order to produce a thesis. I think these are important changes.

From left: Yuyang Cai, Prof ‘t Hooft and Dr Chi Xiong.

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Prof David Gross's 75th Birthday Conference in JerusalemLars BrinkChalmers Institute of Technology

A conference "Quantum Field Theory, String Theory and Beyond" was held at the Israeli Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University in Jerusalem,

Feb 28 - March 3. The first two days of the conference was devoted to a celebration of David Gross' 75th birthday. David Gross was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004 together with David Politzer and Frank Wilczek for their discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interactions, Quantum ChromoDynamics. David Gross is a frequent visitor to Singapore and a strong promotor of fundamental physics in Asia. He last visited Singapore and IAS in January to take part in The Global Young Scientists Summit (GYSS) 2016 and in the memorial conference for Prof Abdus Salam.

The conference had gathered a large number of friends, collaborators and students of David Gross as well as many of the leading quantum field and string theorists from around the world. The list of speakers for the first two days was Curtis Callan, Andy Strominger, Lars Brink, Sasha Polyakov, Lars Bildsten, Hirosi Ooguri, John Iliopoulos, Gary Horowitz, Spenta Wadia, Eric Verlinde, Edouard Brezin, Igor Klebanov, Marc Henneaux, Nati Seiberg, Tom Banks, François Englert and Eliezer Rabinovici. They covered a vast area of modern physics and Callan even talked about microbiology. Even so these were subjects that David Gross had influenced one way or another during his long and remarkable career. In addition to the physics talks, there was a banquet at the restaurant of the Israel Museum, attended by all conference participants and by David Gross's family.

From left: David Gross, Jackie Savani (Mrs Gross), Eliezer Rabinovici, John Iliopouolos, Dieter Luest, Lars Brink and Hirosi Ooguri.

Prof David Gross chatting with speakers and participants of the conference.

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Unpublished C. N. Yang Interview on Teaching and Research in PhysicsYu ShiDepartment of Physics, Fudan University, China

David WaxmanCenter for Computational Systems Biology, Fudan University, China

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Abstract:This is translation of a Chinese transcript of five conversations between Prof. C. N. Yang and others in Beijing in 1986. In the conversations, Yang gave his views on the state and development of physics at that time, and the relationship between physics and philosophy. The conversations also contain Yang’s reminiscences on the creation of Yang-Mills theory and his advice to young people, especially those in China.

In the early summer of 1986, Professor Chen Ning Yang was invited by the Graduate School (Beijing) of the University of Science and Technology of China to give a series of five lectures. China was just beginning to open up, and univer-sities did not have adequate halls for this purpose. As a consequence, the lectures were given in the Friendship Hotel.

The audience consisted of faculty and graduate students from universities all over China. At the end of each lecture there were informal question (Q) and answer sessions, for which proceedings were later published in Chinese1.

Thirty years later, these question and answer sessions make for very interesting reading, from a historical perspec-tive, and also from the perspective of the present. The following is our translation.

Q: Please tell us about the goal of your lectures.

Yang: The subjects of the lectures were quite different, I think, from what was expected. It may have been thought that I would teach a lot about gauge field and high energy physics. If so, the audience was surprised. The contents of the lectures included neutron interference, the Aharonov-Bohm effect, flux quantization, holography, free electron lasers, quasi-crystals, high-energy elastic scattering, Dirac monopoles, fiber bundles, and Non-Abelian gauge fields.

I intentionally did the lectures this way because of two goals I had for these lectures.

Firstly, I am interested in these subjects, many of which reflect the genuine spirit of 20th century physics. Some of these subjects are still under development, such as quasi-crystals and free electron lasers, and there will be great advances in the next twenty or so years and I thought that it would be worthwhile to introduce them to you.

photo courtesy of University of Science and Technology of China

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Secondly and more importantly, through the selection of the topics, I hoped to inform the audience that they had better pursue new subjects in physics. What I wished to emphasize is distinct from the spirit of the teaching of physics that has taken place in China in the last few decades. Frankly speaking, physics students in China have been largely accustomed to sterile reading. I think the situation should be urgently changed. The whole social environment, arising from the attitudes of their parents and the media, has misled students, so that they have followed the wrong direction. Consequently, there are many students who are hard-working, well trained and very knowledgeable about a specific part of the subject, but their breadth of knowledge is narrow, and they have tended to develop expertise in highly mature aspects of the subject. This is very harmful. One of my goals, in the choice of the subjects I discuss here, is to introduce my viewpoint about physics to you. It is not necessary that everyone will be interested in all of the topics, however, if you think about what kind of topics these are, then hopefully you will begin to appreciate which physical problems are worth attention and further investigation.

In their studies, many students form an impression that physics is just calculation. Calculation is, of course, a part of physics, but not the most important part. The most important part is related to physical phenomena. Most of physics follows from observation of phenomena. Physical phenomena are the ultimate origin of physics. Without contact with phenomena, it is not impossible for a student or researcher to produce important work, but it is very probable that what they do is in the wrong direction and purely formal; they will miss the key point of physics. All the important physicists I know attach great importance to real physical phenomena. This is the strong impression I formed after I went to the USA to study. When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I watched Fermi and Teller pay great attention to physical phenomena. Sometimes they performed a complicated calculation, but they were strongly focused on physical reality. During the period of 1948 to 1949, Fermi investigated renormalization, but he did not pay more attention to this than to physical phenomena. Renormalization was only one of many physical problems he considered. There is now a common situation that many people play games with the mathematical structures of physics, at the expense of studying real phenomena.

I have spoken about the teaching of physics in China many times in the last few years. I have given a speech “40 years of learning and teaching”, which has been collected into a volume with the same title. I talked about it in Hong Kong in 1983, and later in Beijing and also Shanghai. It includes

the following comments: “I have visited China many times since 1971, and discovered that there are the so-called ‘Four Courses of Mechanics’ (classical mechanics, electrody-namics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics) in physics departments in the universities, which depress the students. No one denies the importance of the ‘Four Courses of Mechanics’, which form the backbone of physics, but physics with only a backbone is a skeleton. Physics needs a backbone, but it also needs flesh and blood. Only with flesh and blood can physics come alive.

I think this topic touches on a very important problem. In the West, especially the USA, young people often lack training, but they have a spirit of fearing nothing, and are fond of thinking about new things, which are often close to experiments and real phenomena. I hope all of you pay more attention to new things, to living things and to things closely related to phenomena.

How could you actually achieve this? I have a concrete suggestion. There is a magazine entitled Physics Today in America, which is very good. On the first few pages of each issue, recent progress in physics is often introduced. These articles are well written and demonstrate deep thinking. The topics of recent progress that are introduced are, mostly, closely related to experiments, though some are purely theoretical. These articles are very readable and are only introductions, without going into details. For myself, I often read these articles to get to know about new progress of subjects I have heard of, or to get to know from which papers I can read about the new developments. There are many such articles with wonderful things mentioned. I suggest that graduate students and faculty members jointly look at new topics in each issue. In the beginning the study may not be very deep, only gaining knowledge about what is written. If, however, someone is interested in a particular topic, and is willing to read more of the literature on this, and present on this, then the whole group can go deeper. Many of the topics I have lectured on have been covered by Physics Today in the last 5 to 10 years. If, in a department of physics, there is a seminar series on the reports in the introduction of each issue of Physics Today, then this department will be doing a very good job at keeping up with recent developments.

Q: Please tell us about your expectation regarding the development of physics.

Yang: Different physicists have different viewpoints on this question. Let me tell you my personal ideas.

There has been great progress in physics in the 20th century. This was because of developments in experimental

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techniques. At the end of the last century, experimental techniques reached such a level that people were able to perform detailed spectroscopic investigations on molecules, atoms and nuclei. Spectroscopy has provided a large amount of data on atoms and molecules, and many problems that attracted attention in the first quarter of the 20th century came from spectroscopy. Indeed, this led to the formula-tion of quantum mechanics. In the 1930s, accelerators promoted the development of a new field, namely nuclear physics. Following the dropping of the atom bomb, govern-ments of many countries linked progress of physics to the future of their countries after the Second World War. As a consequence, a large amount of money was put into physics research. Together with industry, this created conditions for great progress in various aspects of physics. There have been astonishing developments in two important fields, namely high energy physics and condensed matter physics. However, further development of high energy physics is facing difficulty. It is difficult to do high energy experiments, as too much money is needed. This does not mean there will not be important achievements in high energy physics. For example, I have no doubt that if found, the discoveries of W and Z particles will become cornerstones of the subject. But the number of people working on high energy physics will decrease over time, and the achievements of each person in this field will also decrease. Nowadays, in conferences on high energy physics, it is common that not many important new results are reported. I suppose high energy physics, in the next 30 years, will be in a difficult period. This does not mean there will not be important work. Neither does it mean there will not be people working on it. Nevertheless the situation will not be a prosperous one. Although there are many smart people working on theoretical high energy physics, the theories will not be verifiable in experiments in the near future. Indeed the modern theoretical working style is very different from the past, and working with the door closed (on phenomena) has become inevitable.

On the other hand, condensed matter physics and areas related to technology will make great progress. It is relatively easy to have achievements in these areas.

Q: What is the current situation in theoretical physics? What period in the past is it comparable with?

Yang: Physics is very broad, and differences with the past lie in every direction. However, in most areas, the spirit is the same as in the past. For instance, in solid state physics, there have been great advances in experimental techniques, and there have been qualitative changes in methods of

investigation. You cannot work on it at home, as was the case one hundred years ago, but its spirit is still very close to that of the subject 50 years ago.

Fundamental theoretical physics is based on particle physics. As I said above, particle physics experiments are increasingly expensive, and will inevitably decline in the next 30 years. With fewer and fewer experiments, the people remaining will be mostly theoretical. Some of them are very smart and it is inevitable that the field will become more and more mathematical. Already, fundamental theoretical physics is very mathematical. On the other hand, field theory and statistical mechanics are gradually being connected together. Statistical mechanics is closely related to condensed matter physics. Therefore, field theory is now increasingly connected with statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics. People at the starting stage of their career should pay attention to these points. As to the conclusion, it depends on what you like, what you have learned, and what opportunities you have.

Q: What problems do you think there are in scientific research in China? How can young people join research?

Yang: Let me focus on some general viewpoints that do not necessarily apply to everyone. In China, there are many able, creative and persistent people. No one doubts that China can be at the forefront of developments in physics. But there are also many problems in China. There are problems in industry, in city construction, in education, in living, in families, etc. There are many problems. Why, with so many smart and talented people, are there still so many problems? The answer is very simple and is unique. That is, China is poor. So earning money is the number one thing, at the levels of the individual and country. This does not mean everyone should go on to earn a lot of money. Instead, it means that the whole society should be economically successful. This is an absolute necessity. For many years I have regarded this as the most important thing for China. One should have it in mind when making important decisions. Hence I agree with a slogan in China: Twice double the total productivity of industry and agriculture by the year 2000. This slogan is rational, instead of irrationally making the goal too high. It will be remarkable to realize this goal in the year 2000. This will not only be important for China. It will also tell developing countries that are similar to China, that to make as great a development as China is possible if the goal is clear and achievable. By 2000 everything will be different in China. For the overall benefit of every individual, my understanding is that everyone should try to cooperate to achieve this goal.

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If an individual has made a contribution to the process of realizing this goal, they will recall it with pride in the future. For many years, I have told people studying physics not to enter high energy physics unless you feel you have to. High energy physics has nothing to do with China’s twice doubling, and even has a negative contribution, as high energy physics is very costly. This does not mean high energy physics has no importance. Certainly it has importance, but the problem with China is that of “twice doubling” rather than that of high energy physics.

I feel that too many Chinese students in primary schools, middle schools, and universities, and even in graduate schools, overvalue studying. Studying is a tradition of China, and it has its advantages. But just because of this, it is not so easy to judge on its true value. In the West, especially in the USA, studying is not regarded to be as important as it is in China. In China, especially in cities, parents wish their children to enter good middle schools, good universities, and obtain master degrees and doctoral degrees, and even higher degrees if there were any. This is harmful to China’s economy as well as to the children themselves, as this is not achievable by every child. Here, you are all graduate students, hence you are all good at studying. If you are very happy in doing this then you may think about the problems I have lectured on. I do not agree with the very hard studying that occurred in the past in China. If you are very unhappy with study, you may think about whether doing something else is better for you and for society. For example, maybe you can make a better contribution if you go to a small factory, as you have some knowledge in physics, can speak a foreign language, and know something about the world. With such conditions, studying physics without joy may not be the best way forward.

Q: In “40 years of learning and teaching”, you say the probability of success is higher if a young person enters a new field and grows together with it. What fields do you think have good prospects?

Yang: Quasi-crystals is an example that I have already mentioned. It is a new subject, and some of the basic concepts have not been made clear. Any new direction, with broad connections, has good prospects. If quasi-crystals could only be produced under very special conditions, the prospect for the field’s development and impact would not be very good. But such is not the case of quasi-crystals, as we know.

Another example is if a new direction of experimentation occurs, as when two fast moving giant nuclei hit each other. This must lead to many new and interesting phenomena.

Such phenomena may not be the most fundamental, but are still worth studying.

Yet another situation is the technology that is developed in a new field, which enables people to study phenomena that could not be previously studied. For example, now people can produce high powered lasers, with pulsed electric fields that are stronger than the electric fields inside atoms. Hitting an atom with such lasers can strip a whole shell of electrons. Such experiments are still very primitive. Entering such a field can easily lead to success.

If you work on renormalization of quantum electrody-namics, it is not easy to succeed, as it has a history that spans decades, and many very smart people have worked on it. How can you guarantee that you can do better than these people? This is not to say that working on such topics should be stopped. I am answering a question about which field it is easier to succeed in. To sum up, a field, new in either concepts or technology, or a new experimental direction, has better prospects than a well-trodden field.

Q: How should a physicist regard philosophy?

Yang: The word philosophy has many different meanings. In articles by Western physicists, there are two different meanings, one is the philosophy referred to by philosophers, another is a kind of view on physical problems, at a long or intermediate distance.

Q: Does the second philosophy refer to the epistemology?

Yang: No. Epistemology, as defined by Shoishi Sakata, is a true philosophy, of the first kind. To give an example of the second kind, someone says: “Grand unified theories cannot possibly succeed.” You say: “I agree.” Then the first person says: “We have the same philosophy.” No matter what words are used, the second kind of philosophy represents a viewpoint, namely, what kinds of problems receive attention. This has an important long-term influence. It decides what questions people like to raise, what questions they do not like to raise, what questions they would like answered, and what questions they do not care about. Also, the second kind of philosophy influences what methods people like to use, to solve a problem once the question arises. This sort of philosophy has much to do with one’s style and preferences, and has a decisive impact on one’s long term achievements in research. Everyone develops a philosophy of the second kind, out of their experience. Everyone should be reminded that it has important effects on their research, and they should be aware of it, to some extent.

As to the first kind of philosophy, I think it has a one-way

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relationship with physics. Physics influences philosophy, but philosophy never influences physics.

Q: Einstein thought he had been strongly influenced by Hume’s and Mach’s philosophy.

Yang: I do not agree with this saying. I think his success was because of the second kind of philosophy rather than this reason.

Studying physics is like looking at a large painting. The structure of the whole of nature is like this painting. There are several ways of looking at a painting. Sometimes one should combine different ways of looking. One way is to study it in detail, at a close distance. Since the painting has been made very carefully, different parts are different from each other, and you have to carefully study their details. Another way is to look at it from a great distance, where you may notice some patterns you cannot see at shorter distances. This is what is present at large scales. Certainly there are also views at intermediate distance. Physics needs views captured at far, intermediate and short distances. Certainly, if you can see a pattern that can be seen from a great distance, you make a big contribution. But this possibility is very small, almost impos-sibly so. You thus have to start at a short distance. Generally, the direction of knowledge is from near to intermediate to great distances, rather than the other way around.

An example of the above is that after its foundation, quantum mechanics strongly influenced philosophy, but neither Heisenberg nor Schrödinger started from philosophy. Instead, they started with atomic spectroscopy when they formulated quantum mechanics.

I entirely disagree with the idea of Sakata. I think Sakata has made some contributions to physics, but not out of his philosophy, instead, they originated in his understanding of physical reality. I disagree with his self-said origin in philosophy. His way of starting with philosophy went nowhere. I think he would have achieved more had he used less philosophy.

Q: What do you think of superstring theory?

Yang: Superstring is a topic of great current interest in theo-retical high energy physics. I estimate that there are about 100 people with PhDs working on it. I hardly believe this theory will turn out to be right in the end. The basic concept in high energy theory is the field. This was started by Michael Faraday and through James Maxwell, and to the present, the idea of field was developed with many ups and downs, with countless experimental tests. The superstring started by generalizing the notion of field, without comparison with

experiments. Now there are many papers on superstrings, but none of them has anything to do with experiments. Very likely it is a castle in the air, a dream. In Stony Brook, a graduate student asked me whether he should work on superstrings. My answer was the following. There are many important unsolved problems in high energy physics. There are many beautiful mathematical structures in superstring theory. If you are very interested in this subject and are very good at doing it, with excellent intuitive understanding of differential geometry and topology, you could work on it. But if you regard this direction to be certainly right, then you will be disappointed in the future, because the idea of superstrings has too little contact with real physics. Having little contact with real physics will not necessarily make the subject unsuccessful, but the chance of success is quite small. The mathematical structure of superstrings is very beautiful, and if you work on it, you will absorb these beautiful aspects. These may be helpful to your developing some methods to resolve some real questions. From this standpoint, you could go to do some work on superstrings. My words to the graduate student include my attitude to all of this class of questions concerning pure structures. It is very rare for an idea from abstract mathematics to become very successful in physics. You must be aware of this. Otherwise you could be very disappointed later on.

One can look at the connections of mathematics, theo-retical physics and experiments in the following way:

4. Mathematics3. Theoretical structures of physics.2. Combining theories and experiments.1. Experiments

Parts 2 and 3 together constitute theoretical physics. A pure theoretical structure is connected to experiments through the second part. A pure structure will lose its position in physics and disappear if it cannot be related to experiments. The value in physics ultimately relates to experi-ments. Superstrings have not yet been related to experiments, as in the second part.

If you ask me whether I, myself, will work on superstrings, my answer is that I would never work on such a subject. If I can make myself understand it in two weeks, I will spend two weeks. But now it has become so complicated that I do not believe that I can work out results known to others in less than half a year. Because there are many smart people in this field, half a year is a very large investment, And it is not close to the physics I like. So I will not work on it. I know that I can do the kind of mathematical calculations required for superstrings. But if I were a graduate student, and my

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knowledge of physics had reached my current level, I would certainly go to pure mathematics. There are many beautiful things in pure mathematics. I should use my time and ability to work on the things that really advance mathematics, rather than go to work on things that neither advance physics nor have long-term value for mathematics.

Q: Now there are also people doing phenomenological work.

Yang: Those are far-fetched, far-fetched and far-fetched. Now that there is a pure structure, some people want to connect it to experiments in an ad-hoc way. As with superstrings, super-symmetry has not yet been connected with experiments.

Q: Please elaborate your attitude to supersymmetry.

Yang: Supersymmetry is very beautiful. Theories such as supersymmetry will continue to develop in the future, since the notion of symmetry is more and more important in physics. Since fermions and bosons are not yet treated symmetrically, contemporary theories are obviously imperfect.

The left hand side of Einstein’s gravity equation includes Rμν, while the right hand side includes Tμν. Einstein thought the left hand side is very beautiful, but the right hand side is not good. He said that the left hand side is made of gold, while the right hand side is made of mud. He wanted to turn the matter contribution, on the right hand side, also into something geometric, and move it to the left hand side. To geometrize the matter contribution needs a unification of fermions and bosons.

The basic spirit of supersymmetry is very good, and has something very beautiful. The first time when I saw papers on supersymmetry, I did not believe it, as I thought the Feynman diagrams of fermions and bosons are different. In a certain theory, if the masses of fermions and bosons are equal in the lowest order approximation, then the masses will become unequal in higher orders. But my thinking was incorrect: there are some field theory models where the masses of fermions and bosons are equal in every order of perturbation. Hence it does have some beautiful aspects in some key points, but it still does not have anything to do with experiments, after more than 10 years.

If you ask another question, whether you should enter this field, I think you should be cautious. If you enter another newer field rather than this one, and if you are both interested and good at the subject, then it is easier for you to have good achievements. In a mature field, where many smart people have done a lot of work, what reason do you have for thinking

that you will do better than them? This is like panning for gold, which is certainly better done in a new gold mine. This does not mean that nothing can be panned out of an old gold mine. But the possibility is lower. So I recommend panning in a new gold mine rather than an old one.

Q: What do you think of supergravity theory?

Yang: Einstein’s gravity theory has a close relationship with experiment. Nevertheless he was not entirely satisfied with it. I have said that he wished to geometrize the matter contribution on the right hand side, and move it to the left hand side. It can be thought that supergravity is a beautiful proposal to resolve this problem. But it still has not been connected with experiments.

In Stony Brook, a graduate student from China wished to work on supergravity. I asked him: “are you very interested in supergravity?” He said: “yes.” He learned geometry well. I said: “then you could work on it. You should obtain PhD in a shortest period of time, and pay attention to other subjects, such as solid state physics.” He is now the best student of van Nieuwenhuizen. I believe he will excel in this field. I give this example to illustrate that if some people genuinely like to work on pure structures, and can do well, then let them to do it. But if you have not yet decided what to do, and are not as good as others at things like differential geometry, then I think you had better work on physics closely related to experimental phenomena, which is a safe way of training in theoretical physics. Supergravity is a pure structure, and will fade away if it cannot be related to experiments in 30 years.

Q: Where, in the four parts that you just talked about, does Yang-Mills theory belong?

Yang: There were students asking me about this in America. They said: “When you worked on gauge field in 1954, wasn’t it also a pure structure having nothing to do with experiments?” Indeed it did not have much to do with experiments at that time, nevertheless, if you read our paper, you will find that it has close relations with two theoretical structures that have solid experimental foundations. These are conservation of isospin and the Maxwell equations. Now there is much work of adding flowers to silk, and for pure structures without experimental foundations, which become increasingly distant from experiments, it is very dangerous.

Ever since gauge field theory was put forward, I always paid attention to it, but did not write many papers. I always think it should not be carelessly changed to phenomenology. In the 1960s, there are people who thought it wonderful from the standpoint of pure structure, and did phenomenological

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work on it, amongst whom Sakurai was most notable. He thought that the ρ meson is a gauge particle. I did not agree. His way of doing things was very far-fetched. He wrote to me asking why I was not interested in his work, in a complaining tone. Perhaps I did not reply to him. I was certainly inter-ested in gauge fields, but thought his way of doing things was not good, so I had no way to answer him. Later, people introduced the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking to gauge theories, thereby solving the mass problem of gauge particles without violating the spirit of symmetry. This is an important contribution. This experience tells us that many beautiful pure structures may be related to experiments, perhaps by a subtle revision. This is also the hope of people working on pure structures. However I warn you that the hope of success is very small.

Q: Are you satisfied with Higgs mechanism?

Yang: No. Everyone thinks this. It has its beauty, and fits current experiments. But nobody believes it is the final theory. Its idea is too ad hoc, and is without deep reasons of physics and mathematics, so it will be replaced by other theories. But it is very useful, for now.

Q: What do you think of the unification of gravitational fields and gauge fields?

Yang: Comparing their formulae, one can find that they are very similar. It is no problem that they have close relationship. But what kind of relationship is still a controversial question.

The Fμν of gauge fields and the Rμν of the gravitational field are both curvatures in geometry. The quantity Rμν is the second derivative of gμν, hence Einstein’s gravitational field equation is a second order differential equation for the gμν. Now that the equation of motion of a gauge field ∂ μFμν =…is a first order differential equation, the gravitational equation should be a third order differential equation of gμν. This is also an indication that Einstein’s gravitational equation needs revision. In 1974, after the geometric structure of gauge fields was clear, I put forward a new equation for the gravitational field. But while I was able to write down the left hand side of the equation, I was not able to write down the right hand side. This problem has not yet been solved up to now.

Q: Please comment on the grand unified theory and the role of gauge fields in it.

Yang: Grand unified theory aims to extend the successful electroweak unified theory to also include the strong interac-tion. However, grand unified theory does not fit experiments.

Nature is mysterious. Grand unified theory only simply extends a successful existing theory. Without a new idea, its lack of success is not surprising.

I think the direction of unifying more objects is correct, and I believe that most theoretical physicists agree to this. How they are to be unified in the future I don’t know. No doubt gauge fields will play an important role in the unifica-tion, but perhaps it is not enough to only have this, perhaps there ought to be new ideas that have not been thought of.

Q: What comments would you like to make on sub-quark unified theory?

Yang: These are very speculative subjects. There are many papers, and they have been investigated for many years. It is not appropriate for young people, at the beginning of their graduate studies, to develop in such a direction. Rather, they should work on problems relevant to physical phenomena.

Q: What do you think of the fifth interaction?

Yang: Early this year some journalist reported a paper published in Physical Review Letters, hence the whole world knows there is the so-called fifth interaction. I do not believe such an interaction with the interacting range neither long nor short. If I were the referee, I would agree to publish this paper, but I don’t think it would merit additional publicity.

You do not receive much news in China, so it is easy to be dominated by some fragments of the news. Physicists should have their own attitudes. Some attitudes may be wrong, and should be revised in time. But with their own attitudes, they would not be like weak trees that easily shake with the wind. Some people like to connect some strange structure with some rare experiments. It often happens, but the probability of success is very small.

Q: Please tell us what you think of the phenomenological theories of associated production.

Yang: Frankly speaking, work on this direction, abroad, is without any value, since the people working in this do not know what physics is. In China, in seeing a paper in Physical Review, one often immediately makes an effort to study it. This is often a disadvantage. Papers often come out in the following way. A writes a paper. Then B says it is wrong, and makes a revision. Then C says that B’s paper is wrong, and makes a revision. You read the paper of C, and are trapped in others’ puzzles without foundation. Regarding such things, you should study the original experiment. It is relatively easy to study new things. As it is new, it has not been made

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confusing by many papers. If you enter the field at this time, which is now close to experiments, then it is easy to obtain new interesting results. I have two suggestions: pay more attention to new subjects under development, and pay more attention to original phenomenon. If these two points are implemented, then it is easy to be connected with real physics.

Q: Please tell us what you think of chaos theory.

Yang: This is a new and interesting field. A few years ago, I suggested to some people in China that they work on it. Now it has had a history of 7 to 8 years. But it is still worth working on.

Q: Please comment on finite temperature field theory.

Yang: Finite temperature field theory is very interesting. This is a topic with depth. There are many papers on it, but I did not study them. For such a problem, my general attitude is the following. If I decide to work on it, I will start from the beginning, without reading others’ papers first. Only if there are some difficulties, after working for some while, do I go to read others’ papers. Only in such a way do I digest their work well. Around 1959, T. D. Lee and I wanted to discuss W intermediate bosons, and electromagnetic interactions of vector mesons. We worked from the start. After some time, we noted that many of the papers of others were wrong, though there were many. After a year, we became the top experts. Finite temperature field theory is a very good direction. If someone goes to work on it, I suggest that they work from the start, not necessarily reading others’ papers, rather, reading them after working for some time. This is like arriving in a city for the first time. If you follow others from the start, you may still not know about the city after several journeys. If you try going around by yourself, the situation may be different.

Q: What do you think of the early Universe?

Yang: There have been many papers on it in the last 15 years, among which I suppose there are many interesting papers. However, I have not touched this field. Such questions are very speculative, which is not what I like working on. Some people like working on such a field, and are very successful. If someone is very suitable for doing such work, I think it is a good direction for them.

Q: My advisor asked me to work on superstrings, but I do not have the knowledge on supersymmetry and supergravity. It will need a long time to enter the field, time would be wasted if later it is found that the whole idea is problematic and I give up. On the other hand, I think life is determined by a biological field, and would like to research on it, but I fear that it could be castles in the air.

Yang: I understand everything you said except the biological field. If you have a very original idea, you may think about it in depth, but do not stick to it without limit, you should also pay attention to other things. Let me talk about my own experiences on this aspect.

When I was a graduate student in the University of Chicago, I thought about the following question. In relativity, there is a question of measuring a rigid body by using rulers, which was not yet clear after many years of debate. Now that only the observable subject can be established in physics (now I think this idea may not be always correct, and needs not to be regarded as too sacred), there is no rulers on the fundamental level, and there is no ordinary measurement, physics should not start from ds2 = gμνdxμdxν, as it is not fundamental. One should draw the worldline of every atom. These worldlines form a net in the four dimensional space-time. Physics is the pattern of this net. At that time, I thought this idea is quite reasonable, and is very fundamental. And I told Fermi about it. He said: “it is interesting, you go and develop it.” I thought for a couple of days, and could not go on. From this episode, I draw a lesson that everyone has his or her own line of thinking. If you have an original idea, it is worth thinking about, but do not be obsessed with it. If you are unsuccessful after a couple of days, you should move on to another problem. Always thinking about one thing can make one crazy. Another story is as follows. I had an idea, when I was a graduate student. Noting that the Maxwell equations have a close relation with the conservation of electric charge, and given that conservation of the isotopic spin had been confirmed by experiment, couldn’t there be another kind of gauge field? I developed this idea for a couple of days, and could not go on. After half a year, one year, I felt this idea is very good, so I went back to try. I tried for several times, until 1954. Then the importance of this problem became clearer. To use gauge fields to write down the interaction is a principle, at least for a class of interactions. So I again tried to develop my idea. At that time I was sharing an office with Mills at the Bookhaven Laboratory. We added an additional term [Aμ, Aν] on the right hand side of Fμν = ∂μAν - ∂νAμ, where the Aμ are 2×2 matrices, and the difficulty was finally overcome.

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Nonabelian gauge theory was thus born. The lesson from this story is that, if you have an original idea, do not give it up easily, but do not stick to it indefinitely; you should also pay attention to other things, and broaden your perspective. This is like playing go, if you have a disadvantage at some area, do not stick to it indefinitely: change to another area to develop a territory. Afterwards, circumstances change, and perhaps the old area becomes alive. So there are two points, not only do not give up your original idea, but also work on other things for some time. As to your biological field, I do not understand this; you may discuss it with others.

Q: What do you think of going abroad for graduate study with self-support?

Yang: My thought is, there are many many people in China, studying abroad with self-support is nothing bad. Now that we are discussing this topic, let me elaborate more. I have two comments. First, there are many people from Chinese mainland going abroad for graduate study, and many of them did not go back after receiving their doctoral degrees. This was anticipated. Many years ago, I said it in China. Now many people care about it, regarding it as a great loss, and very bad. I do not agree to it. Many people remain abroad, but there are more people who haven’t gone abroad. So it is not a big problem. In 1950s to 1970s, among those from Taiwan studying abroad, those going back comprise less than 1 to 2 percent. But this did not stop the economic development of Taiwan. Taiwan’s economy has its shortcomings, but it has developed a lot during that period. Second, let me illustrate matters by using a story. Three weeks ago, I was taking a taxi in Hong Kong. The driver was a woman. I said: “You speak good Mandarin.” She said that she went to middle school in Beijing in the 1950’s. She asked what I do. I told her that I am a physics professor living in America. She said very good, but she had a question to ask me. She has a son who graduated from a middle school in Guangzhou and entered the Physics Department of Fudan University. His classmates all wanted to go abroad. So does he. But to go abroad through CUSPEA (China-U.S. Physics Examination and Application), there are only seven or eight successful students each year. He was a top student when he was in middle school, but the competi-tion is strong in Fudan, and he felt that it was not hopeful for him to go abroad through CUSPEA. So he worried very much. Through an American organization, he made contact with a university (I have not heard of its name), but 70 to 80 thousand Hong Kong dollars are needed. She asked me what she should do. After arriving at the destination, I wrote a note to his son. I wrote: “My name is Chen Ning Yang,

and I have two points. One, Fudan University is a first class university, the undergraduate physics education you are receiving in Fudan can only be better, not at all worse, than the undergraduate education in any American university. Second, after your graduation from Fudan, many American universities will accept you for graduate study and provide a teaching assistantship, no matter whether you are sent by the government or go by yourself, since Fudan has a very good reputation in America. I think this is the best way for you to study physics. Finding an arbitrary university in a hurry does nothing good for you.”.

Acknowledgment:

We thank Prof C. N. Yang for his advice.

References:

[1] C. N. Yang, Proceedings of the Graduate School of the University of Science and Technology of China (in Chinese), October issue (1986), reprinted in Collected Papers of C. N. Yang (in Chinese) (East China Normal University Press, Shanghai, 1988).

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Superconductivity in a Terrestrial Liquid: What Would It Be Like?

It is a pleasure to have been invited to contribute to this volume which celebrates the 90th birthday of the doyen of contemporary condensed matter theory, Phil Anderson.

I thought I would take the opportunity to indulge in a little piece of science-fiction fantasy, analogous to what was done by the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut in his invention of ice-IX.1 Readers may recall that at the time that his novel Cat’s Cradle was written, there were eight different known solid phases of water, none of them stable above zero temperature Celsius. Vonnegut (whose brother was a physical chemist) postulated a ninth form, which would be stable at and above room temperature, but which was separated from both liquid water and the known phases of ice by a free energy barrier so high that it had never been realized in the history of the earth. One day a scientist synthesizes it in his laboratory, and it is eventually released into the environment. What Vonnegut implicitly assumes, but does not tell the reader (he is writing a novel, not a physics textbook!) is that the transition between water and ice-IX belongs to the small sub-class of first-order transitions (which includes the A-B transition in superfluid liquid helium-3)2 which are “hypercooled,” that is, which have the property that the latent heat released is insufficient

to warm the system back above the equilibrium transition temperature, so that the velocity of propagation is not, as in the usual case, limited by the need to get rid of this heat but only by the speed of sound. As a result, when the ice-IX sample is released, the oceans freeze near-instantaneously, with predictably gloomy consequences for mankind. Of course, as far as we know, ice-IX is (thankfully!) a fiction, but by thinking about it one learns quite a bit more generally about the properties of first-order phase transitions.

The fantasy I am going to explore is equally improbable but also perhaps equally fertile in its implications: a liquid which is superconducting under conditions which are not too remote from the ambient terrestrial ones (e.g., similar to those under which existing high-temperature superconduc-tivity occurs in the cuprates). The present context may not be totally inappropriate for such an exploration, since it makes contact with at least three of the many areas in which Phil has worked, namely high-temperature superconductivity, neutron stars (see below) and the anomalous electrostatic effects discovered by Tao and co-workers in ordinary super-conductors.3 The main question I will raise is: what would be the novel macroscopic effects associated with such a system?

Anthony LeggettNobel Laureate in Physics 2003Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Although it seems rather unlikely that superconductivity could occur in the liquid state under ambient conditions, there seems to be no rigorous principle which forbids it. I raise, and make a first pass at answering the question: What would be the anomalous macroscopic properties of such an “ambient-conditions liquid superconductor”?

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An attempt to answer this question may perhaps give us a new perspective on the “familiar” superconductivity which occurs in solids.

Before addressing this question, however, a few comments are in order. First, the idea of superconductivity occurring in a system which by any reasonable definition is liquid is of course itself not at all novel: it is confidently believed that in certain regions of a neutron star not only the neutrons but the (minority) protons may form Cooper pairs, and thus the system would be expected to show not just superfluidity but also superconductivity, with the usual consequences such as magnetic vortices. Closer to home, Ashcroft and co-workers have conjectured4 that hydrogen, when subjected to sufficiently high pressures (~a few 100GPa) might not only become a metallic liquid but also form Cooper pairs, possibly of both electrons and protons, and thus exhibit superconductivity; they have moreover raised the question how one might identify such an anomalous superconducting state.5 However, the attainment of such high pressures would presumably require experimental conditions very different from those under which the conventional superconductors are usually studied, so that these authors do not place much emphasis on any novel features in the gross macroscopic behavior, but concentrate mainly on effects associated with the coexistence of two different order parameters. Thus, as far as I know, the question I raise here has not previously attracted much attention in the literature.

Secondly, let’s just think for a minute about how improbable a liquid superconductor under “near-ambient” conditions (hereafter abbreviated ACLS to stand for Ambient Conditions Liquid Superconductor) actually is.a To the best of my knowledge, while there may be electrolyte solutions which are liquid down to the highest temperature at which superconductivity is currently known to occur (about 160K), the lowest temperature at which any liquid metal phase is stable under atmospheric pressure is 234K (for Hg), leaving some distance to go. Of course, this simple comparison may not be very meaningful. Indeed, we should consider separately the prospects for “BCS-like” (phonon-mediated) superconductivity and for the “exotic” (all-electronic) type. As regards the former, while the atomic disorder character-izing the liquid state may not in itself be an impediment to the occurrence of superconductivity (some of the highest-temperature BCS superconductors are strongly amorphous alloys), it is not entirely clear whether the fact that the

disorder is time-dependent, with a timescale which is of the same order as or shorter than the typical timescale for superconductivity (Planck’s constant divided by the thermal energy at the transition temperature) would have a strongly inhibiting effect on the latter (note that this feature of liquid behavior is not entirely captured by the structure of the phonon spectrum as studied in Jaffe and Ashcroft4). My untu-tored guess is that it would not; however, since among the known superconductors the ones with the highest transition temperatures are “all-electronic”, one might prima facie think that an ACLS would be likely to use the latter mechanism. Here, however, there is a serious difficulty: the currently available experimental evidence suggests that almost without exception the order parameter in these existing materials is anisotropic (non-s-wave). As is well known, such an order parameter is highly vulnerable to even static disorder, let alone the timedependent variety. Thus, all in all, the existence of an ACLS seems rather improbable (but then, so prior to 1986 did superconductivity above 100K!).

I now turn to the main topic of this essay, namely the novel macroscopic properties that the ACLS state might be expected to manifest. While the discussion below is entirely qualitative, for definiteness I shall assume that the (orders of magnitude of) the physical parameters of the ion and elec-tron systems are comparable to those of (say) the cuprates, so that, for example, the superconducting condensation energy is of the order of a few degrees K per (superconducting) electron. For comparison, the energy associated with surface tension should be of order 104K per (surface) atom (c.f. below), while that required to lift an atom through 1 cm in the earth’s gravitational field is about 1 mK. Armed with these numbers, let us consider the likely behavior of the system under two different kinds of experimental conditions: (a) the ACLS (or more precisely the normal liquid metal just above the notional onset temperature for superconductivity) is confined to a cell or tube, with no free surface, (b) it is contained in an open bowl or similar geometry. In contrast to Jaffe and Ashcroft,4 I will assume throughout that pairing occurs only in the electron system, the ions themselves remaining throughout perfectly “normal”.

Let’s first consider case (a). In the case of the traditional (solid) systems, superconductivity manifests itself at the macroscopic level principally through two phenomena, the Meissner effect and the near-infinite metastability of circulating currents in a ring geometry (the more easily demonstrated phenomenon of nonzero current through a wire with zero voltage drop can be reduced, conceptually speaking, to one or the other of these two depending on the parameters). The Meissner effect is a thermodynamic

a After submission of the manuscript, I became aware of the paper of P. P. Edwards et al., ChemPhysChem 7, 2015 (2006), which discusses the possible existence of ACLS in liquid metal-ammonia solutions.

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equilibrium phenomenon, and so prima facie the only way a difference between a standard superconductor and an ACLS could show up would be if the ion system could deform appreciably to give a lower-energy equilibrium state; since compressional energies are presumably similar to those in the standard case, this seems unlikely in the closed geometry of case (a). So I think my prima facie expectation would be that the ACLS would show a complete Meissner effect in a sufficiently small external magnetic field, and also the conventional type-II behavior in higher fields (since there seems no obvious reason why the standard Abrikosov vortices should not occur, with static properties similar to the usual case).

With regard to the possibility of persistent supercurrents, which is a metastable rather than a thermodynamic equilib-rium phenomenon, the most obvious difference with a very disordered solid alloy is that, at least over timescales long compared to the typical ionic rearrangement time, there is no obvious way in which any Abrikosov vortices present are going to be pinned; hence one would expect that as soon as the field generated by the current exceeds the lower critical field (which is likely to be of the order of the earth’s magnetic field) the system will transition to a resistive state. This behaviour is not of course qualitatively different from that of some known superconductors. However, there is a second possible mechanism of resistance which has no analog in that case: Consider a thin-ring geometry (transverse dimensions of the ring smaller than the pair radius), and the nature of a fluctuation which will allow the order parameter to slip 2π of phase and thereby reduce the circulating supercurrent. In the usual Langer–Ambegaokar–McCumber–Halperin (“LAMH”) scenario6,7 the mechanism is a fluctuation to zero of the order parameter over a length of the order of the pair radius, with the total electron density remaining close to constant over the whole length of the phase slip; such a process has a cost per unit area of the order of the condensa-tion energy times the pair radius. Any large deviation in the total electron density, such as being driven to zero over this or a smaller length, is strongly suppressed by the Coulomb force. However, in an ACLS the ions may be able to move so as to counteract this effect, and the only extra energy involved is then that involved in the surface tension necessary to form a thin slab of vacuum bridging the cross-section of the ring, thereby allowing the phase slip. Given the order-of-magnitude numbers listed above, it seems possible that this mechanism might be competitive with the LAMH one, thus possibly rendering unstable superflows in thin rings which in the standard scenario would be effectively metastable. In thicker rings the absence of a vortex pinning mechanism is

likely to have a qualitatively similar effect, cf. above.Apart from the two fundamental manifestations of

superconductivity discussed above, the traditional systems show a variety of other characteristics: vanishing Peltier coefficient, Josephson effect, etc. To the extent that the leads themselves are “conventional” normal or superconducting materials (which the liquid ions cannot penetrate) it seems likely that the qualitative behavior of an ACLS with respect to such phenomena will be similar to the normal one.

Things become a lot more interesting when we consider the “open” geometry of case (b). Those readers old enough (like the present author) to remember playing in their pre-OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administra-tion) childhoods with droplets of mercury in the kitchen sink will not need to be reminded that the surface tension of metallic liquids is exceptionally high, ~1 in SI units (which translates into the figure given above). However, it is conceivable that this is not the only germane considera-tion: in particular the “Tao effect”3 may be relevant. This effect is most naturally interpreted as showing that at least under certain circumstances there is an extra surface energy associated with the superconducting state. Originally, the effect was thought to be peculiar to the cuprates, and an explanation was developed3 in which a crucial role was played by the strong anisotropy of these materials, a feature which would presumably be lacking in an ACLS; however, subsequent experiments8 suggest that it does not require such anisotropy but is actually a generic property of the superconducting state. To be sure, in existing experiments the surface energy in question is small (~10−3 SI), and occurs only in electric fields ~1kV/cm, but the mere fact that it is not fully understood indicates a non-negligible possibility that the surface tension of an ACLS may be anomalous even in the context of liquid metals.

Irrespective of this (but assuming the surface tension is not much less than that of a typical liquid metal), let us consider how an ACLS may be expected to behave in a weak magnetic field (such as that of the earth). A crucial differ-ence from the case of an ordinary solid superconductor is of course that the electron and ion systems can deform together, thus preserving overall charge neutrality and avoiding the activation of the strong Coulomb forces. Thus, we need to minimize the sum of at least four and possibly five different energies: condensation, magnetic, ordinary surface tension, gravitational and possibly anomalous electrostatic (“Tao”) energies. This would seem to be a rather non-trivial (and highly geometry-dependent) problem. Were it not for the large surface tension contribution, my gut instinct (not based on any quantitative calculation at this stage) is that the ACLS

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would spontaneously form a thin film and coat its surround-ings (thereby presumably constituting a considerable safety hazard!). Presumably, the surface tension would suppress this behavior in its extreme form, but for a large enough sample this effect must be overwhelmed by the terms proportional to volume. So, if we imagine trying to conduct a standard levitation experiment with the ACLS originally contained in an open bowl, what will happen? Readers are invited to make their own guesses/calculations; all I know is that I would not like to be the environmental safety officer responsible for developing a handling protocol for this system.

Obviously, while I have stated in this essay what I believe to be an interesting problem, the above discussion only scratches its surface, and is almost certainly lacking in sufficient imagination. Indeed, I would take a large bet that in the improbable event that an ACLS is actually realized in the laboratory, it will rapidly turn out to have various novel and intriguing properties not anticipated above. I heard the story (for whose authenticity I cannot vouch) that when the Finnish electronic giant Nokia had produced a new type of hand-held electronic device and wanted to explore its potential, it let loose on it a group of seven-to-nine-year-olds, who rapidly came up with applications which their elders had never imagined. Perhaps we should do the same with an ACLS if it is ever realized!

Acknowledgments:

This material is based upon work supported as part of the Center for Emergent Superconductivity, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the United States Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Award number DE-AC0298CH1088. I thank Cai Peng and Tang Peizhe for helpful comments. It is a pleasure to dedicate this essay to Phil Anderson and to wish him many more years of happy and fruitful research in physics.

References:

1 J.K. Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (Delacorte Press, New York, 1963).

2 A.J. Leggett and S.K. Yip, in L.P. Pitaevskii and W.P. Halperin (Eds.), Helium-3 (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1990).

3 R. Tao, X. Zhang, X. Tang and P.W. Anderson, Forma-tion of high-temperature superconducting balls, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 5575–5578 (1999).

4 J.E. Jaffe and N.W. Ashcroft, Superconductivity in liquid metallic hydrogen, Phys. Rev. B 23, 6176–6179 (1981).

5 E. Babaev, A. Sudbø and N.W. Ashcroft, Observ-ability of a projected new state of matter: a metallic superfluid, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 105301 (2005).

6 J.S. Langer and V. Ambegaokar, Intrinsic resistive transition in narrow superconducting channels, Phys. Rev. 164, 498–510 (1967).

7 D.E. McCumber and B.I. Halperin, Time scale of intrinsic resistive fluctuations in thin superconducting wires, Phys. Rev. B 1, 1054–1070 (1970).

8 R. Tao, X. Xu, Y.C. Lan and Y. Shiroyanagi, Electric-field induced formation of low temperature super-conducting granular balls, Physica C 377, 357–361 (2002).

This article was originally published in PWA90: A Lifetime of Emer-gence (World Scientific, Singapore 2016)

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Einstein Versus thePhysical Review

Daniel KennefickAssociate Professor of Physics, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville,Editor, Einstein Papers Project, California Institute of Technology

Albert Einstein had two careers as a professional physicist, the first spent through 1933 entirely at German-speaking universities in central Europe,

the second at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1933 until his death in 1955. During the first period he generally published in German physics journals, most famously the Annalen der Physik, where all five of his celebrated papers of 1905 appeared.

After relocating to the US, Einstein began to publish frequently in North American journals. Of those, the Physical Review, then under the editorship of John Tate (pictured in Fig. 1), was rapidly assuming the mantle of the world’s premier journal of physics.1 Einstein first published there in 1931 on the first of three winter visits to Caltech. With Nathan Rosen, his first American assistant, Einstein published two more papers in the Physical Review: the famous 1935 paper by Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) and a 1936 paper that introduced the concept of the Einstein–Rosen bridge, nowadays better known as a wormhole. But except for a letter to the journal’s editor he wrote in 1952—in response to a paper critical of his unified field theory work—that 1936 paper was the last Einstein would ever publish there.

Einstein stopped submitting work to the Physical Review after receiving a negative critique from the journal in response to a paper he had written with Rosen on gravita-tional waves later in 1936.2 That much has long been known, at least to the editors of Einstein’s collected papers. But the story of Einstein’s subsequent interaction with the referee in that case is not well known to physicists outside of the

A great scientist can benefit from peer review, even while refusing to have anything to do with it.

Fig. 1. John T. Tate, circa 1930. Tate edited the Physical Review at the University of Minnesota from 1926 until his death in 1950. (Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Archives.)

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gravitational-wave community. Last March, the journal’s current editor-in-chief, Martin Blume, and his colleagues uncovered the journal’s logbook records from the era, a find that has confirmed the suspicions about that referee’s iden-tity.3 Moreover, the story raises the possibility that Einstein’s gravitational-wave paper with Rosen may have been his only genuine encounter with anonymous peer review. Einstein, who reacted angrily to the referee report, would have been well advised to pay more attention to its criticisms, which proved to be valid.

Doubting gravitational waves

Einstein introduced gravitational waves into his theory of general relativity in 1916, within a few months of finding the correct form of the field equations for it. Although the concept of gravitational radiation was then relatively new and no experimental evidence existed to support it, the analogy with the case of the electromagnetic field was so compelling that by the 1930s most scientists thought that gravitational waves must exist in principle. Nevertheless, in 1936 Einstein wrote to his friend Max Born:

Together with a young collaborator, I arrived at the interesting result that gravitational waves do not exist, though they had been assumed a certainty to the first approximation. This shows that the non-linear general relativistic field equations can tell us more or, rather, limit us more than we have believed up to now.4

Einstein submitted this research to the Physical Review under the title “Do Gravitational Waves Exist?” with Rosen as coauthor. Although the original version of the paper no longer exists, Einstein’s answer to the title question, to judge from his letter to Born, was “No.” It is remarkable that at this stage in his career Einstein was prepared to believe that gravitational waves did not exist, but he also managed to convince his new assistant, Leopold Infeld, who replaced Rosen in 1936, that his argument was valid.5

But not everyone was so easily convinced. The Physical Review received Einstein’s submission on 1 June 1936, according to the journal’s logbook. Tate returned the manuscript to Einstein on 23 July with a critical review and the mild request that he “would be glad to have [Einstein’s] reaction to the various comments and criticisms the referee has made.” Einstein wrote back on 27 July in high dudgeon, withdrawing the paper and dismissing out of hand the referee’s comments:

Dear Sir,We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manu-

script for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the—in any case erroneous—comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.

Respectfully,

P.S. Mr. Rosen, who has left for the Soviet Union, has authorized me to represent him in this matter.

On 30 July, Tate replied that he regretted Einstein’s deci-sion to withdraw the paper, but stated that he would not set aside the journal’s review procedure. In particular, he wrote, “I could not accept for publication in THE PHYSICAL REVIEW a paper which the author was unwilling I should show to our Editorial Board before publication.”

The paper was, however, subsequently accepted for publi-cation by the Journal of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia,6 a periodical in which Einstein had already published. The paper appeared with radically altered conclusions in early 1937. Aletter dated 13 November 1936, from Einstein to the journal’s editor, indicates that the institute had accepted the paper in its original form: Einstein simply explained why “fundamental” changes in the paper were required because the “consequences” of the equations derived in the paper had previously been incorrectly inferred.

What originally led Einstein to the conclusion that gravitational waves do not exist? Having set out to find an exact solution for plane gravitational waves, he and Rosen found themselves unable to do so without introducing singularities into the components of the metric that describes the waves. This was surely not at all what they had hoped for. But, like good physicists confronted with the unexpected, they attempted to turn it to their advantage. In fact, they felt they could show that no regular periodic wavelike solu-tions to the equations were possible.7 Instead of a solution to the Einstein equations, they had a nonexistence proof for solutions representing gravitational waves— a far more important and breathtaking result.

Today it is well known that one cannot construct a single coordinate system to describe plane gravitational waves without encountering a singularity somewhere in spacetime. But it is also understood that such a singularity is merely apparent and not real. It is a coordinate singularity, analogous to the problem one encounters when attempting to find the longitude of the North Pole. Einstein was one of the first

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to understand the critical difference between coordinate and physical singularities, but in the 1930s there was still no mathematical formalism for distinguishing between the two. It was something that had to be worked out by trial and, frequently, error. Only after World War II did the identifica-tion of singularities become rigorous. In 1936 Einstein and Rosen were too cautious, treating a harmless coordinate effect as a real physical pathology. It simply did not occur to them that trying to cover the whole of their spacetime with a single coordinate system was asking too much.

Chance meeting

In the summer of 1936, the relativist Howard Percy Robertson (pictured in Fig. 2) returned to Princeton from a sabbatical in Pasadena, and later that year struck up a friendship with Einstein’s then newly arrived assistant Infeld. One of the most distinguished figures in the new field of cosmology, Robertson was a colorful, jovial character who enjoyed cultivating enemies as much as he, in Infeld’s words, “enjoyed spiteful gossip” about his colleagues.

He told Infeld that he did not believe Einstein’s result, and his skepticism was unshakable. Robertson went over Infeld’s version of the argument with him, and they discovered an error.5 Infeld related the conversation to Einstein, who

concurred and drastically changed the Franklin Institute paper in proofs.

Robertson had uncovered an error in his (Infeld’s) version of the proof, Einstein replied that he had coincidentally and independently uncovered an error in his own proof the night before.5 Unfortunately Infeld gives no details about those errors in his autobiography. He writes that Einstein had only realized that his proof was incorrect and had still not managed to find the gravitational wave solution he had been looking for.

But Einstein had been closer to a solution than he thought and it was here that Robertson made his key contribution, at least according to remarks made by Rosen in a later paper of 1955.8 Robertson observed that the singularity could be dealt with by a change of coordinates, an approach that revealed that Einstein and Rosen were dealing with a solution representing cylindrical waves. With the coordinate change the worrisome singularities were relegated to the central axis of the spacetime, where one would expect to find the source of the cylindrical waves.

Associating singularities with a material source was relatively common and widely accepted, although Einstein and some others had often expressed serious reservations about the practice. But any port in a storm will do, and Einstein was happy to retitle his paper “On Gravitational Waves,” and present those cylindrical waves, which he had stumbled upon unwittingly.

The irony, of course, is that Einstein could have found that escape route months earlier, simply by reading the referee’s report that he had dismissed so hastily. The referee had also observed that casting the Einstein–Rosen metric (as we now call this solution of the Einstein equations) in cylindrical coordinates removes the apparent difficulty.

Coincidentally, in the Soviet Union, Rosen was also having second thoughts, and wrote back to Einstein that he, too, thought there was an error in the paper. But Rosen was not completely happy with the Franklin Institute version, so in 1937 he published his own revised treatment—one that proves only the nonexistence of plane gravitational waves—in a Soviet journal.7 That paper is the closest account we have to the original manuscript submitted to the Physical Review. After the war, Ivor Robinson, Hermann Bondi, and Felix Pirani showed that Rosen’s argument was incorrect because the singularities involved were merely coordinate in nature.

Meanwhile, Einstein was not a man to waste time on embarrassment. Infeld relates the amusing detail that Einstein was due to give a lecture in Princeton on his new nonexistence proof, just one day after his discovery of its errors. He had not yet spoken to Robertson and discovered

Fig. 2. Howard Percy Robertson (1903–1961). (Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, PHYSICS TODAY Collec-tion.)

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the way out of his difficulty, and so was obliged to lecture on the invalidity of his own proof. He concluded the talk by saying “If you ask me whether there are gravitational waves or not, I must answer that I do not know. But it is a highly interesting problem.”5

Einstein rarely let personal pride interfere with his work. While they were working on the popular book, Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta, which they wrote together, Infeld told Einstein that he took special care because he could not “forget that your name will appear on it.”

Einstein laughed his loud laugh and replied:‘You don’t need to be so careful about this. There are incorrect papers under my name too.’5

Referees and precedents

Although it now bears Einstein and Rosen’s names, the solu-tion for cylindrical gravitational waves had been previously published by the Austrian physicist Guido Beck in 1925. ButBeck’s paper was completely unknown to relativists with the single exception of his student Peter Havas, who entered the field in the late 1950s. In a 1926 paper by the English mathematicians O. R. Baldwin and George B. Jeffery, and in the referee’s report on Einstein’s paper, there was discussionof the fact that singularities in the metric coefficients are unavoidable when describing plane waves with infinite wavefronts. But although such a wave shows some distortion, in the words of the referee, “the field itself is flat” at infinity.9

Clearly, the referee’s familiarity with the literature exceeded Einstein’s, but then Einstein was notoriously lax in that regard. The published Einstein–Rosen paper contains no direct reference to any other paper whatsoever and only two other authors are even mentioned by name. In response to Infeld’s suggestion that he search the literature for previous work, Einstein laughed and said, “Oh yes. Do it by all means. Already I have sinned too often in this respect.”5

So who was the referee? The report is 10 pages long and shows a deep, if not total, familiarity with the literature on gravitational waves; the referee knew of the 1926 paper by Baldwin and Jeffery, but not Beck’s of 1925. The copy forwarded to Einstein was typewritten and the spelling followed American practices. That points to an American author with a strong interest in general relativity. Few people at the time—among them Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Chase Tolman, both based in California—fit that description. Suspicion naturally falls on Robertson too, of course. After all, he appeared to have the solution to the paper’s flaws at

his fingertips in the fall of 1936 when he spoke with Infeld.In the first half of 1936, Robertson was on sabbatical

at Caltech, and therefore absent from Princeton when the gravitational-wave paper was presumably written. (Rosen did not leave for the Soviet Union until near the end of July, according to a letter written on his behalf by Einstein to Vyacheslav Molotov on 4 July.) Robertson apparently did not return to Princeton until mid-August. Einstein was on vacation in upstate New York until late August; the angry letter to Tate, dated 27 July, was sent from Saranac Lake. Therefore Robertson’s encounter with Infeld, which probably took place in early October, may have been his first opening to approach the great man in person about the difficulties with his paper.

Robertson’s own papers are preserved in the Caltech archives. Among them, when I first browsed the collection ten years ago, was a letter to Tate, written on 18 February 1937. Robertson writes,

You neglected to keep me informed on the paper submitted last summer by your most distinguished contributor. But I shall nevertheless let you in on the subsequent history. It was sent (without even the correction of one or two numerical slips pointed out by your referee) to another journal, and when it came back in galley proofs was completely revised because I had been able to convince him in the meantime that it proved the opposite of what he thought.

You might be interested in looking up an article in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, January 1937, p. 43, and comparing the conclusions reached with your referee’s criticisms.

Therefore, it seems clear that Robertson was the referee. Finding that Einstein had completely ignored his written critique, he took the opportunity of their collegial closeness at Princeton to correct the great man in a less confrontational fashion. Blume’s release of the logbook records—a decision made because 69 years have passed and no one involved is still living—confirms the identity (see Fig. 3).

Inspired by this discovery, I returned to the Robertson archives to check on his movements that summer. To my surprise, further material had been added to the archive: Sitting in the middle of the Tate correspondence was most of the immediate exchange between Robertson and Tate concerning the Einstein–Rosen manuscript. Here is what Robertson had to say in his reply (dated 14 July) to Tate’s still-missing original letter:

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Dear Tate:Well, this is a job! If Einstein and Rosen can estab-lish their case, this would constitute a most impor-tant criticism of the general theory of relativity. But I have gone over the whole thing with a fine-tooth comb (mainly for the sake of my own soul!), and can’t for the life of me see that they have established it. It has long been known that there are difficulties in attempting to treat infinite plane gravitational disturbances in general relativity—even in the classical theory the potential acts up at infinity in such cases—and as far as I can see the additional, much more serious, objections of Einstein and Rosen do not exist. I can only recommend that you submit my criticisms to them for their considera-tion, and with this in mind I have written up in duplicate a series of “Comments” which you can, if you are so minded, send them. The alternative would be to publish it as it stands, taking account only of Comments (a) and (b) which deal with typographical errors of a minor sort. Such a paper would be certain to give rise to a lot of work in this field of gravitational waves, which might be a good thing—provided they didn’t flood you out of house and home.

Tate thanked Robertson and rewarded his diligent referee in the usual manner—by sending him another tricky assignment.

Early journal policies

We are probably justified in assuming that Einstein, over-come with the novelty of receiving such a report, barely

glanced at the 10-page set of referee comments he was sent. German journals in the early part of the 20th century were considerably less fastidious than the Physical Review about what they published. Infeld claimed that the German attitude, in contrast to that prevailing in Britain and America, was “better a wrong paper than no paper at all.”5 In a March 1936 letter to Einstein, the relativist and fellow European exile Cornelius Lanczos, who had himself been on the receiving end of one of Robertson’s reports, remarked on “the rigorous criticism common for American journals” such as the Physical Review.10

Historians Christa Jungnickel and Russel McCormmach have studied in some detail the editorial policies of Annalen der Physik, the leading German journal of the early 1900s, and note that “the rejection rate of the journal was remark-ably low, no higher than five or ten percent.”11 They describe the editors’ reluctance to reject papers from established physicists, even relatively junior ones. As they put it, “Now and then the journal published bad papers by good physi-cists.” In one specific example, editor Paul Drude annoyed Max Planck by printing what Planck considered a worthless paper, whose author had “appealed to [Drude] personally, and Drude lacked the heart to refuse him.”11

Planck’s own editorial philosophy was to “shun much more the reproach of having suppressed strange opinions than that of having been too gentle in evaluating them.”10 In America things were different, although Robertson and Tate surely treated Einstein more gently than they would have many others. Indeed, Robertson, in his very next report to Tate, commented that the author “is a man of good scientific standing, and it would seem to me that if he insists, he has more right to be heard than any single referee has to throttle!” That dispute turned more on matters of interpretation, though, and when it came to a paper that might actually be

Fig. 3. An early extract from the Physical Review logbook. The Einstein–Rosen article was received by the journal on 1 June 1936. After a delay of more than a month, John Tate sent a referral to Howard Percy Robertson on 6 July, finding him in Moscow, Idaho, on vacation after a sabbatical at Caltech. Robertson returned the manuscript and his review to Tate on 17 July. Six days later the package was sent back to Einstein. (Courtesy of Martin Blume, American Physical Society.)

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wrong, even an Einstein had to be queried, however gently.Doubtless the rigorous criticism may have come as

something of a shock to Einstein, who was accustomed to gentler treatment early in his career. However, Einstein could be very frank and direct in his criticism of others’ work. From 1914 on, as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, he was regularly called on to review articles submitted to the academy’s proceedings. The German word for worthless frequently occurs in those brief reviews. As a member of the academy, Einstein had his papers published without ques-tion or revision. Anything less must have seemed to him a tremendous slight.

In his letter to Einstein, Tate had carefully avoided stating that anonymous review by the editorial board or others was a necessary step in the acceptance of a paper by the journal. In fact, the Physical Review logbook suggests that neither of the two previous papers by Einstein and Rosen, including the one with Podolsky, had been sent to a referee: In both cases the field for the referee’s name was left blank, and the EPR paper was sent for publication the day after its receipt at the journal. Therefore it is likely that the gravitational wave paper was Einstein’s first encounter with the anonymous peer-review system practiced in American journals at the time.

That Tate chose to have the 1936 paper refereed is inter-esting. After all, Einstein’s two previous submissions were certainly controversial. EPR is arguably the most controver-sial paper Einstein ever published, and the Einstein–Rosen bridge paper was part of an ongoing controversy with Ludwig Silberstein.10 Einstein and Rosen’s letter to the Physical Review in 1935 was part of this same debate. Tate published both of those papers without outside advice.

A paper purporting to prove that gravitational waves did not exist, though, apparently sounded alarms with him. Nowadays one imagines that most physicists of the time knew little and cared even less about general relativity. But apparently gravitational waves were already such a well-accepted prediction of the theory, despite the absence of experimental support, that such a surprising result warranted some scrutiny. More than a month elapsed between receipt of the paper and its referral to Robertson. The delay certainly suggests hesitation on Tate’s part, and may even be evidence of an initial round of editorial discussion.

In general Tate did not like to slow the publication of important work and often relied on his own editorial instincts, 12 which certainly served Einstein well. Tate published the better-known papers expeditiously and, by consulting Robertson for the third, saved Einstein from what would have been a very public embarrassment. The relatively innocuous Franklin Institute paper still attracted

newspaper attention. Indeed, Rosen learned that the paper had appeared only when he received a newspaper clipping about it from a friend. The price for Tate was that he would never again receive a submission from “his most distin-guished contributor.”

Special thanks go to Martin Blume and the Physical Review for permission to see and publish the critical line and details from the logbook. Also thanks to Diana Buchwald for translation of Einstein’s letter to Tate, and to John T. Tate Jr for permission to quote from his father’s correspondence. I am grateful to the Caltech Archives for permission to quote from the correspondence of H. P. Robertson and to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for permission to quote from Einstein’s correspondence.

References:

1 A. Pais, in The Physical Review: The First Hundred Years, H. H. Stoke, ed., AIP Press, New York (1995), p. 1.

2 A. Pais, “Subtle is the Lord”: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford U. Press, New York (1982), p. 494.

3 D. Kennefick, in The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity, H. Goenner, J. Renn, J. Ritter, T. Sauer, eds., Birkhäuser-Verlag, Boston (1999), p. 207.

4 A. Einstein, The Born–Einstein Letters: Friendship, Politics, and Physics in Uncertain Times, MacMillan, New York (2005), p. 122.

5 L. Infeld, Quest: An Autobiography, Chelsea, New York (1980).

6 A. Einstein, N. Rosen, J. Franklin Inst. 223, 43 (1937).7 N. Rosen, Phys. Z. Sowjetunion 12, 366 (1937).8 N. Rosen, in Jubilee of Relativity Theory, A. Mercier, M.

Kervaire, eds., Birkhäuser-Verlag, Basel, Switzerland (1956), p. 171.

9 G. Beck, Z. Phys. 33, 713 (1925); O. R. Baldwin, G. B. Jeffery, Proc. Phys. Soc. London, Sect. A 111, 95 (1926).

10 P. Havas, in The Attraction of Gravitation: New Studies in the History of General Relativity, J. Earman, M. Janssen, J. Norton, eds., Birkhäuser-Verlag, Boston (1993).

11 C. Jungnickel, R. McCormmach, Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein, vol. 2, U. of Chicago Press, Chicago (1986), p. 309.

12 A. O. C. Nier, J. H. Van Vleck, in Biographical Memoirs, vol. 47, National Academies Press, Washington, DC (1975), p. 461.

Reproduced with permission from Phys. Today. Copyright 2005, AIP Publishing LLC. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2117822)

ARTICLES


Reflections on the Discovery of Einstein’s Gravitational Wave

On January 11, 2016, in a news conference held in Washington D. C., it was announced that after nearly two decades of arduous work, the gravita-

tional wave proposed by Einstein a century ago was detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO.) In today’s “flat world,” this major scientific observa-tion also created a ripple in Hong Kong and Macau at the end of the globe. On January 12 and January 19, Professor Tjonnie G. F. LI presented to the Physics Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in Cantonese and English, respectively. On January 20, the University of Macau invited Mr. Chon-Fai Kam, a native of Macau and a PhD. candidate in theoretical physics of CUHK to also present a discussion to the university community at-large. The title of Mr. Kam’s talk is “Einstein’s Gravitational Ripple: The Conquer of a Century.” Due to the great timeliness of the subject, the University of Macau made a special effort to bring the notice of this presentation to the attention of the secondary schools in Macau.

The instant reaction of Hong Kong and Macau at the other end of the globe made me thought of the reaction of another great event in 1957 in Singapore. That year, I was in my fifth grade in elementary school. In October, I read in the Chinese newspaper a report that two Chinese, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, received “something something” high accolade. I remember vividly in the newspaper showed a picture of Tsung-Dao Lee, standing in front of a blackboard. On the board there were characters that looked like squiggles of some sort!

I remember that I was quite excited by the report. The reason for my excitement was not because Lee and Yang won the physics Nobel Prize. After all, at that point in my life, I neither knew what physics was, not what the Nobel Prize meant! I was excited because “just like me,” Lee and Yang were Chinese! Of course, in hindsight, the “just like me” was very much an over stretched of the imagination!

However, as soon as my excitement subsided, what

happened subsequently was a string of disappointments. One of the disappointments was because I knew nothing about the great achievements of these two gentlemen. The next disappointment was whomever I asked, I could not get a clear answer, or any answer at all. As an elementary school student, I considered students in Junior High School or Senior School surely possessing a great deal of knowledge. Yet I soon discovered that those I knew in Junior and Senior High Schools knew no more than me, which was nothing. At that time in Singapore, there were two institutions of higher learning, the newly created Nanyang University and the University of Singapore. As far as I could recall, neither made any effort to publicly explain the greatness of Lee and Yang! Eventually, I came to the conclusion that “good things cannot happen here!” This is what I refer to nowadays as a “third word mentality!”

The reaction in Hong Kong and Macau to the discovery of the gravitational wave is indeed a strong contrast to the reaction to Lee and Yang nearly sixty years ago. Today, I can easily imagine that no bewilderment will bestow a fifth grade student. After all, he/she could go online, could ask his/her classmates, parents, even his/her teachers. Worse come to worst, he/she could even go to and be welcome by CUHK or the University of Macau to attend the public lectures on this great discovery! In his/her mind, there is no room where “the third world mentality” could hide!

In recent years, I have often given lectures where I explic-itly mentioned that nurturing the “inherent self-confidence” of Asian youth is an important, if not the only mission of education. From this perspective, while it is obviously a good deed that the University of Macau rapidly reacted to the announcement of the discovery of the gravitational wave, but it is even more important that as a university, it deems assistance to youngsters to develop “inherent self-confidence” as fundamental. To me, allowing “good things can happen here” is an important step in instilling “inherent self-confidence!”

Da Hsuan FengDirector of Global Affairs and Special Advisor to Rector, University of Macau,Fellow of the American Physical Society

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Recent News from the Overseas Chinese Physics Association

2016 APS March Meeting FIP (Forum on Interna-tional Physics) Reception and the OCPA Awards Ceremony

The FIP reception, which took place Tuesday, March 15, from 6:00 - 8:00 pm, in the Baltimore Hilton, was a great success attended by over 60 international participants. Representa-tives of the OCPA, including Prof Dongping Zhong (Ohio State; OCPA Secretary) and Prof Xuan Gao (Case Western; OCPA Vice Chair Communication Committee) were in attendance. Several international organizations spoke and presented awards, after which Dr Amy Flatten (APS Director of International Affairs) spoke about the mission and activities of the APS FIP. In addition to OCPA, the Korean Society and the Iranian Society also spoke. There was also a sizable contingent of Turkish participants. It was truly an international gathering.

Regarding OCPA and its constituency, several ethnic Chinese physicists based outside of the USA and Canada

Albert ChangOCPA PresidentDuke University

were elected 2015 APS Fellows. The full list, as well as those from the US and Canada, is available on the OCPAWEB site (http://ocpaweb.org/home/2015-aps-fellows/). In particular, Prof. Yugang Ma (SINAP, Shanghai) was on hand to receive his fellowship certificate and pin (please see photo).

During the OCPA Awards ceremony, I spoke about the mission and main activities of the OCPA, as well as the upcoming OCPA9 conference in Beijing (July 17-20, 2017 with a High School Program on July 16). I invited all to come to Beijing. In addition, I spoke on our goal to connect with international physics and astronomy organizations.

The OCPA Award winners were all in attendance to receive their award plaques and checks. These included OYRA (Macronix Prize) winners, Prof Lu Li (Michigan) and Prof David Shih (Rutgers), and AAA (Robert T. Poe Prize) winners, Prof Yu-Gang Ma (SINAP) and Prof Qing-Feng Sun (PKU). Please see attached photos, courtesy Prof Dongping Zhong.

From right: Amy Flatten (Director of International Affairs, APS), Albert M. Chang (President. OCPA), Young-Kee Kim (President, Association of Korean Physicists in America), and Farbod Shafiei (President, Iranian-American Physicists Group Network).

Yugang Ma receiving his 2015 APS Fellow certificate from the reception host, Young-Kee Kim (U Chicago; President, Association of Korean Physicists in America).

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2015 APS Prize Winners

Earlier, we announced the winners of the 2016 APS Prizes.

1) 2016 Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics Recipient: Xiangdong Ji, University of Maryland, College Park and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, for pioneering work in developing tools to characterize the structure of the nucleon within QCD and for showing how its properties can be probed through experiments; this work not only illuminates the nucleon theoretically but also acts as a driver of experimental programs worldwide.

2) 2016 Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics Recipient: I-yang Lee, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for seminal contributions to the field of nuclear structure through the development of advanced gamma-ray detectors as realized in the Gammasphere device, and for pioneering work on gamma-ray energy tracking detectors demonstrated by the Gamma-ray Energy Tracking Array(GRETINA).

3) 2015 Carl E. Anderson Division of Laser Science Dissertation Award Recipient: Yang Zhao, Stanford University, for her thesis entitled "Bio-Inspired Nanophotonics: Manipulating Light at the Nanoscale with Plasmonic Metamaterials."

4) 2015 Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Atomic, Molecular, or Optical Physics Recipient Norman Yao, Harvard University, for "Topology, Localization, and Quantum Information in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Systems."

5) 2015 Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Biological Physics Recipient Quan Wang, Stanford University, for his thesis "Enabling multivariate investigation of single-molecule dynamics in solution by counteracting Brownian motion."

6) 2016 Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics Recipient Chun Shen, McGill University, for his successful prediction of anisotropic flow in Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC, his elucidation of the ̀ direct photon flow puzzle', and his contributions to the development of a computational tool of viscous fluid dynamics enabling precision studies of relativistic heavy-ion collisions.

7) 2015 M. Hildred Blewett Fellowship Recipient: Huey-Wen Lin, UC-Berkeley. Huey-Wen Lin is a visiting assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She conducts research in particle and nuclear theory and is investigating properties of hadrons to provide Standard Model inputs to searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. The Blewett Fellowship will enable Lin to continue her research and publish papers using the data accumulated during the years prior to her break, with the goal of getting back on the academic tenure track. She will also access supercomputing facilities to improve results and explore connections with other physics subfields.

OCPA Outstanding Young Researcher Award OYRA (Macronix Prize) winner Lu Li receiving his Award from OCPA President Albert Chang.

OCPA Outstanding Young Researcher Award OYRA (Macronix Prize) winner David Shih receiving his Award from OCPA President Albert Chang.

OCPA Achievement in Asia Award AAA (Robert T. Poe Prize) winner Yu-Gang Ma receiving his award from OCPA President Albert Chang.

OCPA Achievement in Asia Award AAA (Robert T. Poe Prize) winner Qing-Feng Sun receiving his Award from OCPA President Albert Chang.

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Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the “Rencontres de Moriond”International Workshop on “Fundamental Science and Society”ICISE, Quy Nhon, Vietnam, 7-8 July 2016

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the prestigious “Rencontres de Moriond”, the Ministry for science and technology of Vietnam, the Popular

Committee of the Province of Binh Dinh, the “Rencontres du Vietnam” and the “Rencontres de Moriond” are organizing a workshop on the theme “Fundamental Science and Society”, with the high patronage of UNESCO and the support and labels of the International Solvay Institutes and CERN. The workshop benefits from the sponsorship of H.E. Vu Duc Dam, Vice Prime minister and H.E. Chu Ngoc Anh and Nguyen Quân, Minister and Former Minister of Science and Technology of Vietnam. The two-day event will take place in Vietnam, at the new International Conference Center in Quy Nhon, during the first week of July 2016 (7 and 8 of July).

The “Rencontres de Moriond” have played an instru-mental role in the development of High Energy Physics in the last 50 years. The new International Conference Center in Quy Nhon, where their sister activity “Rencontres du Vietnam” take place, constitutes a focal intellectual center in South-East Asia devoted to high-level education and curiosity-driven research, in the heart of one of the most dynamical and future-oriented regions on the planet. The topics addressed by the workshop are relevant to all fundamental sciences. This will be reflected in the invita-tion of leading figures not only from physics, but also from mathematics, economics, chemistry and biology.

Two important ideas would be emphasized: • Fundamental science transforms our world with

the changes it brings, and its impact on the technological revolutions such as electronics, lasers, web…, on sustainable development in green chemistry, understanding climate change, energy, and on health, e.g. genetics, imaging…, and

on all societal applications which originate from it, such as cellular phones, GPS…

• Fundamental science – and large projects in particular – is organized around societal models which are based on collaboration and competition (“coopetition”), open mind-edness, sharing and friendship among peoples, of which one brilliant example is CERN, but also the Rencontres de Moriond. These models are relevant to developed societies which tend to isolate themselves in individualism, relativism, even sectarianism, but also to developing societies, because they participate in this development, contribute to peace and to common values, the bases for humanity.

The workshop will be structured around round tables addressing various historical, current and future issues relevant to fundamental science and society, with an opening up towards Asian countries, in particular towards developing countries around Vietnam and the themes proper to them.

Prof Jean Tran Thanh Van with late Nobel Laureate Prof Abdus Salam.

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High-level representatives of the Vietnamese government have confirmed their participation in the inaugural session. This event will be an opportunity for scientists to interact with decisions makers and representative of private economy.

http://rencontresduvietnam.org/conferences/2016/fundamental-science-and-society/

The conference will be organized at the International Center for Interdisciplinary Science and Education in Vietnam (ICISE) by Rencontres du Vietnam, a scientific non-profit organization. The venue is located at a beautiful beach in Vietnam, thus allowing participants also to enjoy

the nature, culture while having rich scientific discussion. The conference will be followed by the "Particles, Strings and Cosmology" (PASCOS 2016).

The International Centre for Interdisciplinary Science Education (ICISE) in the city of Quy Nhon (Central Vietnam) has the ambitious objective to focus on developing science and education, helping young Asian students and scientists to meet with the international science community, bringing the opportunity to accelerate their knowledge by attending lectures and sharing ideas with overseas high-level counterparts.

The International Centre for Interdisciplinary Science Education (ICISE) in Quy Nhon , Vietnam.

Map of Qui Nhon and ICISE General view of the ICISE Center

NEWS


Rare Astronomical Event: Partial Solar Eclipse Observation in NUS

The Institute of Physics, Singapore (IPS) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) Department of Physics organised a Solar Eclipse Event at NUS

football field from 8th (evening) to 9th (morning) March 2016. This spectacular astronomical phenomenon (a partial solar eclipse) with an obscuration of almost 90% was visible in Singapore on the morning of 9th March. It started at 7:22am on 9 March, reaching 87% obscuration at 8:23am.

Solar eclipses occur when the Moon moves in between the Sun and Earth, casting a shadow on the Earth's surface. This year, the major eclipse occured in South East Asia which is certainly a rarity in this part of the world. The 9th March eclipse was more spectacular than the one observed in Singapore seven years ago, in 2009 (slightly above 80% obscuration).

Two NUS physics students sponsored by the NUS Physics department, Ms Laurentcia Arlany and Mr Edmund Yuen, took 3 flights to Luwuk (Sulawesi) Indonesia on an expedi-tion led by a well-known local astronomer Mr Michael Mathews to observe the total solar eclipse. The main objec-tive is to look for shifts of stars’ positions during the Total Solar Eclipse there by verifying Einstein’s General Relativity Theory. Incidentally, this year is the 101st anniversary of the discovery of the Theory of General Relativity. This exercise of looking for the shifts in stars’ positions is supervised by NUS dons, Dr Abel Yang and Assoc. Prof Phil Chan, and is the first of its kind done by local astronomers.

Mr Mathews filmed the solar eclipse and also telecast the eclipse “LIVE” to the NUS football field directly from Sulawesi. More than 3,000 people watched the Partial Eclipse

Cindy Ng Director of the IPS-NUS Solar Eclipse Event

Abel YangDeputy Director of the IPS-NUS Solar Eclipse Event

Phil ChanSolar Event Advisor and Deputy Head (Resource) of NUS Physics Department

Teachers at the astrophotography exhibition.

NUS staff and students, as well as members of the public, attended the public lectures on solar eclipse, safe solar observation and solar imaging.

NEWS


and watched the live telecast from Indonesia at the NUS football field. Ms Laurentcia remarked, "Seeing a total solar eclipse is a rare opportunity. It is a different view from what people see in Singapore, which is only partial."

The two-day IPS-NUS event led by Dr Cindy Ng started on the eve of the solar eclipse with public lectures explaining the solar eclipse, safe solar observation and solar imaging. The speakers were Assoc. Prof Phil Chan, Mr Alfred Tan (Vice Principal of Paya Lebar Methodist Girls' School and a renowned solar amateur astronomer), and Mr Grey Tan, one of the founders of “TinyMOS”. “TinyMOS” is a start-up by NUS students that launched Tiny1, the first-ever portable astrophotography camera which can capture barely-visible celestial objects with an exposure of approximately 30 seconds and offers a live preview for locating constellations and stars.

There was also an overnight star-gazing session at the football field. Students from the Department of Physics, the Special Programme in Science (SPS) and the NUS Astronomical Society (NUSAS) set up telescopes to observe the celestial highlights of the night.

Many well-known local amateur astronomers namely, Mr James Ling, Mr Remus Chua, Mr Kelvin Ng, and Mr Pan Junwei were invited to share their expertise. NUSAS also held a Messier Marathon, their first-ever attempt to find as many Messier objects as possible during one night in Singapore. Messier objects are a set of over 100 astronomical objects first listed by French astronomer and comet hunter Charles Messier in 1771.

The Science Faculty also organised a two-day astro-photography exhibition, featuring the works of Mr Remus Chua (former NUS research scholar and renowned astro-photographer), Dr Abel Yang, and Astrophysics students from the NUS Observatory.

Well-known local amateur astronomer, Mr James Ling’s giant refractor is one of the main attractions at the NUS Solar Eclipse.

Taken at Luwuk (Sulawesi) Indonesia by Ms Laurentcia Arlany (MSc particle physics) & Mr Edmund Yuen (Astrophysics undergraduate) from the NUS Astro and Particle Physics group, Solar Eclipse 2016.

More than 3000 participants waited in anticipation to witness this rare phenomenon.

Watching the live telecast of the total solar eclipse live telecasted from Sulawesi, Indonesia. Participants were filled with excitement as they observed the peak of the solar eclipse as it reached 100% obscuration.

NEWS


Turing Prize Winner Prof Andrew Chi-Chih Yao Explores Development of Quantum Computing at HKUST 25th Anniversary Distinguished Speakers Series

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) hosted the 25th Anniversary Distinguished Speakers Series on 28 January, featuring Prof Andrew

Chi-Chih Yao, the only Chinese Turing Prize winner.In his talk titled “Quantum Computing: A Great Science

in the Making”, Prof Yao told the audience the secrets in the atoms that could potentially unleash the enormous power of quantum computing. He also delved into the advantages of quantum computing and shared his insights into how it will revolutionize information processing.

“Quantum computer comes at a fortuitous time when the Moore’s law for computing is starting to reach its physical limit imposed by quantum mechanics. The design of quantum computer offers a daring approach: to take advan-tage of the quantum problem instead of fighting it,” he said.

Prof Yao received his Bachelor of Science in Physics from Taiwan University in 1967, PhD in Physics from Harvard University in 1972, and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in 1975. From 1975 onward, he served on the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, University of California in Berkeley and Princeton University. In 2004, he joined Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he is now Dean of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences.

Prof Yao’s research interests are in the theory of compu-tation and its applications to cryptography, algorithmic economics, and quantum computing. He is recipient of the prestigious Turing Award in 2000, as well as numerous other honors and awards, including the George Polya Prize, the Donald E. Knuth Prize, and six honorary doctorates. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Academia Sinica, and the Academy of Sciences of Hong Kong.

Distinguished speakers including Nobel Prize winners, corporate leaders, entrepreneurs and key financial policy

shapers were invited to speak at the HKUST 25th Anniver-sary Distinguished Speakers Series. Prof Steven Chu, Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1997 and former US Secretary of Energy, was invited as the inaugural speaker of the series. Other speakers include Mr Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Schneider Electric; Mr Wang Shi, Founder and Chairman of China Vanke; Prof Dan Shechtman, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 2011; Prof Zhong Lin Wang, Hightower Chair in Materials Science and Engineering and Regents’ Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology; Dr Raghuram G Rajan, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India; Mr Pinky Lai, Founder and Design Director of Brainchild Design Group and Brainchild Design Consult-ants; and Dr Qi Lu, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Applications and Services Group. More talks are also being lined up.

Reproduced with permission from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Prof Andrew Yao talks about “Quantum Computing: A Great Science in the Making” at HKUST 25th Anniversary Distinguished Speakers Series.

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Physics from Iran’s Point of View

From the time of Ibn-e-Heytham the spectacular Iranian physicist in 965 A. D to the time when the Physics Society of Iran was founded in 1932, with

the guidance of Dr Hesabi, the borders of Iranian physics' community have become greater and broader. Although PSI's activities were quite limited and often interrupted and gradually faded at the time, it was gathering and holding sessions called “The Group of Physics and Chemistry” which was the inauguration of physics research studies in Iran.

Nowadays, the physics curricula at the major Iranian research institutions are comparable to those of any American or European universities and, unlike in earlier generations, the majority of courses are taught by physicists educated in Iran. Women also found their way through fundamental science studies as well as other majors and they are now active as professors and researchers throughout Iran.

The frontier of physics in Iran concerns research studies in which many important branches in physics, such as Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics; Condensed Matter and Materials Physics; Nuclear Physics; Particles Physics and Fields, Cosmology and Early Universe, and Astrophysics; Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, Plasma Physics, and Fluid Dynamics; Soft Matter, Biological, and Interdisciplinary Physics are covered. There are numbers of institutions and universities in Iran working on physics in various topics from theory to experiment. Outstanding centers in fundamental studies through which young researchers can benefit the atmosphere to thrive in various fields, provide weekly seminars, courses and schools on recent significant advances in physics. They also have, invited speakers from overseas to keep up with the world's updated topics. Signing the Memorandum of Understanding with overseas groups like Diamond Light Source, is another big stride for Iran toward joining the international collaborations. From Iran's contribution to several international projects, SEASEM and DIAMOND Light source, and collaboration with the CMS projects at LHC, can be indicated.

Zahra Gh.MoghaddamQShahid Beheshti University (National University of Iran)

Numbers of Iranian outstanding physicists in 1932.

Iran's (physics department of Shahid Beheshti University) PhD exchange program not only in physics but in various fields of research.

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Physics branches in Iran are keeping up with global updates, for instance, from the recent works in High energy physics, studies on string theory, extra dimension and holographic description of gravity, AdS/CFT correspondence and its variants, string cosmology, dS holography, tachyon physics, are prominently popular. Moreover, High energy phenomenology is also an area of interest; studies on new physics beyond Standard Model like MSSM, CP violating phases, Neutrino physics and Dark Matter are quite notable. Likewise, in Astrophysics and Cosmology sector, studies on Early Universe and matter anti-matter asymmetry are highlighted as well.

In order to motivate PhD students and enrich the physics research studies, Iran initiated the Annual Prize bestowed in a number of categories in physics for the best written PhD thesis.

After the nuclear agreement between Iran and 5+1 coun-tries, the prospect of Iran's physics research projects is getting to be more promising. Consequently, Iran can be expected to be even more involved in international collaborations such as ITER, the massive nuclear fusion project, and more experi-ments at CERN. For example, since the great discoveries in neutrino physics have been made in mines and tunnels to shield the experiments from cosmic rays, the Fordow facility, one of the peacefully privileged nuclear facilities which has been built under a mountain near the city of Qom, could be used for a variety of possible physics experiments, including a neutrino detector or a linear accelerator.

Additionally, a few major scientific facilities are currently under preparation within Iran, including the Iranian National Observatory, a 3.4-meter telescope planned to perch atop Mount Gargash in central Iran, and the Iranian Light Source Facility in collaboration with SESAME and DIAMOND light source, under construction near Qazvin. These could see more international collaboration under the deal as well.

In order to keep up with the technology advancements in practical zone in Iran, both engineers and physicist establish science based companies working on manufacturing and designing the extensive range of physics' laboratory equip-ment including general to advanced experiments.

All in all, bearing the bright talents and hardworking members, Iran's imminent future in physics is quite auspi-cious. Furthermore, by being more associated with inter-national collaborations, Iranians could attend international schools, conferences and visits much easier than before.

The first pair of steel tables and shielding superstructures for LHC, CMS experiment which has been manufactured in Iran, Arak, an industrial town 200 km west of Tehran.

Shahid Beheshti University (National University of Iran)

Fordow Nuclear facilities, Near Qom, Iran.

NEWS


9th Yukawa-Kimura Prize awarded to Associate Professors Nishimura and Hanada

On 20 January, an award ceremony for the 9th Yukawa-Kimura Prize of the Yukawa Memorial Foundation took place in the Panasonic Audito-

rium of the Yukawa Hall, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP).

The award recipients -- Associate Professor Jun Nishimura of the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), and Program-Specific Associate Professor Masanori Hanada of the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research and YITP -- were each presented with a certificate, medal, and cash prize from Director Taichi Kugo of the Yukawa Foundation. Professor Nishimura delivered a commemorative lecture, titled "Numerical simulation of supersymmetric gauge theory and gauge/gravity duality", on behalf of the awardees.

The Yukawa-Kimura Prize was established in 2007 by the Yukawa Memorial Foundation (a public-interest corporation since 1 April 2012) based on a donation from Ms Hiroko Kimura, widow of Professor Toshiei Kimura of Hiroshima University's Research Institute for Theoretical Physics (RITP), which was merged into YITP in June 1990. The Y-K Prize honors outstanding achievements in areas related to fundamental theoretical physics, including gravitational physics, spatiotemporal theory, and field theory. Recipients are chosen by a YITP selection committee.

Reproduced with permission from Kyoto University.

From left: YITP Director Misao Sasaki, Yukawa Foundation Director Kugo, Associate Professor Nishimura, Program-Specific Associate Professor Hanada, and Dr Shinya Aoki, chair of the Yukawa-Kimura Prize selection committee

NEWS


Report on IPS Award 2015

About the IPS Awards 2015

The Institute of Physics, Singapore (IPS) presents awards annually to recognise and reward local or international physicists for outstanding achievements in their respective fields made in Singapore.

It is IPS’ objective to identify and honour physicists who are currently doing state-of-the-art physics research or making innovative physics education contributions on an annual basis.

These awards serve to encourage younger members of the Singaporean physics community to attain greater success in

Phil ChanIPS Awards Chair 2016IAS Associate Fellow

future as they probe the marvelous yet unknown frontiers of the physical Universe and communicate physics to the schools and public.

In celebration of SG50, IPS presented awards to more than one awardee in some of the categories when there are other deserving outstanding candidates. This year’s award ceremony was held in conjunction with the Conference on New Physics at the Large Hadron Collider Banquet organised by Institute of Advanced Studies, Nanyang Technological University at Chui Huay Lim Club on 3rd March 2016. The 2015 SG50 outstanding IPS Medalists are given below.

Prof Lai Choy Heng receiving the President’s Award from IPS President Prof Sow Chorng Haur

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IPS Crescendas Award for Outstanding Secondary School Physics Teacher

Mr Tan Chong Chay (Hong Kah Secondary School) IPS Crescendas Award for Outstanding Junior College

Physics Teacher Mr Sze Guan Kheng (Raffles Institution) IPS Crescendas Award for Outstanding Polytechnic

Physics Lecturer Dr Randall Cha (Temasek Polytechnic, School of

Engineering)Mr Jeremy Chong (Nanyang Polytechnic, School of

Engineering) IPS Crescendas Award for Outstanding ITE Physics

LecturerMr Tay Khee Wee (Institute of Technical Education,

College West) IPS Cadi Scientific Award (Group) for Public Aware-

ness of PhysicsMr Soh Kim Mun, Mr Ang Poon Seng, Mr Albert Ho,

Mr Albert Lim (The Astronomy Society of Singapore)

IPS Cadi Scientific (Individual) Award for Public Awareness of Physics

Mr Remus Chua (Navagis Asia Pacific Pte Ltd) IPS Nanotechnology AwardAssoc Prof Xiong Qihua (Nanyang Technological

University)Assoc Prof Fan Hongjin (Nanyang Technological

University) IPS World Scientific AwardAsst Prof Zhang Baile (Nanyang Technological Univer-

sity) Special Institute of Physics, Singapore Award Adj Assoc Prof James Lee (National University of

Singapore and National Cancer Center) Institute of Physics, Singapore President’s AwardProf Alfred Huan (Nanyang Technological University)Prof Lai Choy Heng (National University of Singapore) Distinguished Institute of Physics, Singapore Honorary

Fellowship Award Prof Chang Ngee Pong (City College of The University

of New York)

Prof Alfred Huan receiving the President’s Award from IPS President Prof Sow Chorng Haur

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Joint IAS-ICTP School on Quantum Information Processing

The Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics

(ICTP) jointly organised a School on Modern Topics in Quantum Information Processing in Singapore. It was held from 18 January to 29 January 2016 at the Nanyang Executive Centre, NTU. The two-week event was filled with quantum information talks and public lectures by 3 physics Nobel laureates on three separate occasions, namely Prof Sir Anthony Leggett (Physics 2003), Prof Serge Haroche (Physics 2012) and Prof Gerard `t Hooft (Physics 1999).

A total of 85 international participants from various developing countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, India and China, as well as from Australia, Korea and United Kingdom. The topics covered in the first week revolved around quantum algorithm and quantum computers, topological quantum computation, Majorana fermions. In the second week, the main topics were experimental aspects of quantum computation and quantum information, fundamentals concepts like entanglement, matrix product states, tensor network and quantum correlations, quantum metrology and interferometry.

The first day, 18 January 2016 (Monday), kicked off with five talks on quantum information after the opening ceremony in the morning by Prof KK Phua, Director of IAS who spoke the close collaboration between ICTP and IAS. K.K. Phua also mentioned about the immense contribution of Adbus Salaam in setting up the ICTP. On the second day, the program stretched all the way till the evening with a public talk (6:00pm to 8:00pm) by three Nobel laureates from three different fields; Prof Carlo Rubbia (Physics 1984), Prof Arieh Warshel (Chemistry 2013) and Prof John Robin Warren (Physiology or Medicine 2005). The central theme of the forum was Science, Scientists and Society and the event was held at the School of Art, Design and Media’s Auditorium

Raymond OoiQuantum & Laser Science (HIR Building), Department of Physics,University of Malaya

at NTU. The event was fully packed and was chaired by Prof Bertil Andersson, NTU President, who optimized the time to encourage intelligent questions from the audiences, particularly students.

On the third day, a morning lecture was given by Sir Anthony Leggett on the prospects of topological quantum computing using physical effects in condensed matter. He showed mathematically how non-Abelian systems can be topologically protected, and he discussed at length the fractional Quantum Hall effect (FQHE) in torus geometry and elaborated on the Kitaev model for spin half system in honeycomb lattice. He also touched on p-wave Fermi superfluid of Helium-3 in two dimensional geometry with pairing in spin triplet. Finally, he highlighted the issues and limitations of the optical lattice systems for use in quantum information technology as compared to superconducting qubits.

In the afternoon of the fourth day, Serge Haroche talked about quantum metrology with nonclasical atomic Rydberg states. He showed how one could achieve precision measurement below the standard Quantum Limit (SQL) and approach the Heisenberg limit (HL) by entangling the Dicke states in the angular momentum of Rydberg atom with linear Stark effect. The precision technique involves the use of the Schrodinger’s cat state (SCS), the Ramsey technique and dynamical quantum Zeno effect.

On the fifth day, Gerard ‘t Hooft talked about cellular automaton. He introduced a novel idea of quantum cells that contain quantum information of all interrelated events from the past. The insight of the idea may stem from the 3-point correlation function. He also alluded to the connection with conformal symmetry. According to him, quantum field theory contains all quantum correlations that arise naturally.

Prof Gerard ‘t Hooft also delivered a second public talk in the evening at NUS (Lim Seng Tjoe LT) concerning the

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roadmap and exploration toward colonization of planet Mars involving some high-tech projects. He also mentioned the issues like cost of such a plan and the funding for advanced robotic and information technologies, the feasibility of using transit vehicle to land on Mars, and the possibility of survival on Mars as a “Living Unit” including the problems of weight, foods and water supply.

Synopsis of lectures at the School

For the School, the lecture series on quantum information were given by several experts in the fields of quantum information.

Matthias Troyer talked about the computation and numerical aspects of quantum algorithms. According to him, the performance of quantum computers demonstrated by D wave is not exponential as expected in theory nor is there any quantum speedup, even though Google is moving towards quantum computing with ambitious “save the world” aspira-tions. There is a lot can be learned from there. He discussed the potential weaknesses and possibilities of improvement in connection with quantum Monte Carlo simulation and

quantum annealing involving Ising spin glass. The necessary ingredient not only quantum algorithm but also quantum software engineering or programming language.

David DiVincenzo showed that superconducting qubit is promising for quantum computer due to its high fidelity. He also discussed the double well system in 2DEG with one single and three triplet states, which somewhat reminds us of the four states of 1s2s in atomic helium. It is interesting to learn that it is also possible to lift quantum degeneracy via introduction of defects & electron tunneling.

Ady Stern talked about the topological state of matter and Majorana fermions. The lecture covers multifold degeneracy from fractional quantum Hall to topological quantum computation. He gave a good introduction on the quantum Hall effect and discussed the emergence of fractional spins. defined the topological sector, the edge state as 1D system with anomaly and disordered quantum Hall state.

According to Jiannis Pachos, the concept behind topology is related to the concept used in string theory, particularly through the Chern-Simons theorem. We learnt that the Majorana fermions and anyon can be described by the quantum phase and the Dirac equation. He discussed the

D wave 512 qubits quantum computer (courtecy of D-wave Systems Inc.)

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Toric code - spin 1/2 on square lattice is Abelian from Pauli algebra, has topological entanglement entropy that is useful for topological quantum memory. It is learnt that conversion from one ground state into another ground states can be achieved via transformation and all topological models are error correcting codes.

The talks by Stern and Pachos have also touched on Forster theorem cavity, Bogoliubov de Gennes, Majorana Fermion for universal quantum computation arising from Dirac fermions, Ising model, Bose Hubbard, Mott insulator, superfluid, BCS regimes, braiding concept in topology, anyons, Chern-Simons theory, Abelian and non Abelian systems.

Andreas Winter presented the concept of entanglement using the entropic approach especially the Shannon entropy with connection with classical communication channels, and made use of the bounds of inequality relations.

Jeremie Roland talked about the recipes in quantum computations, namely the necessary algorithms that involves the Oracle problem and Deutsch algorithm in terms of circuits, the concept of reversible computation and universal quantum gates, complexity issue and the power and capabilities of quantum computers. He discussed the thermodynamics aspect of quantum information in terms of quantum gates.

The lecture given by Xin Wan touched on the materials, devices and algorithms used for the development of a FQHE (Fractional Quantum Hall effect)-based topological quantum computer. He showed how fractional quantum Hall effects can be observed in two-dimensional electron system such as GaAs quantum wells or in high mobility graphene. Besides, he presented the Laughlin states that support gapped Abelian quasiparticle excitations which carry a fraction of an electron charge. Gapless chiral edge excitations are also described by Laughlin states in which the quasiparticles propagate along the edge. He also introduced the model of anyons (theory of a two-dimensional medium with a mass gap, where the particles carry locally conserved charges) as

well as the Moore-Read state. In his lectures, he also showed how interferometric experiments can be demonstrated and how we harness current technology to create anyons and also how we can manipulate them to achieve braiding. The final session was about the algorithms to compile topological quantum gates. He ended the lecture with an interesting remark that the Chinese characters may contain some topological information.

Vadim N. Smelyanskiy elaborated on the theory of rf SQUID as superconducting qubit and the detailed physics of flux associated with the magnetic fields and the underlying tunneling, diffusion and noise phenomena. He presented the experimental implementation of quantum computation, particularly on quantum annealing with flux qubits. He first presented the Hamiltonian associated with the flux qubit in rf-SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) and the coupling between the qubits. He then introduced the origin of the flux noise as the fluctuations of magnetization formed by the impurity magnetic moments in the oxide layer on the surface of superconductor and expressed the noise as a contribution to the total Hamiltonian. From the spin-diffusion equation obtained using the Langevin approach, the spin diffusion noise power spectrum was calculated. The effect of geometry on the spin diffusion noise spectrum was analysed for rectangular, cylindrical and elliptic-cylindrical wire. In the analysis of the noise he presented many other interesting analytical approaches such as diffusion eigenvalue problem in elliptic coordinates, graphical solution of the eigenvalue problem, Mathieu harmonics, dependence of the noise spectrum on Aspect Ratio, inhomogeneous spin diffusion equation, sum rule for magnetic susceptibility.

The lecture by Frank Verstraete covered the topics of entanglement, matrix product states and tensor networks. He first introduced a concept called the monogamy of entangle-ment and then the translational invariance, area law and local singlets as the criteria to minimize the energy of the systems. AKLT model was used to study matrix product states wave-function which fulfill the previously mentioned criteria. He then presented the fundamental theorem of multipartite state, and related it to Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. Finally, he introduced and analyzed RVB states which have applications in topological quantum computation.

The presentation by Rainer Dumke was on the advances in quantum information technology with cold and trapped neutral atoms in magnetic trap. He presented the utilization of neutral atoms in clocks, interferometers, magnetometers, atomtronics, many-body physics, etc. Then, he mentioned the Divincenzo criteria which includes the five criteria that any candidate quantum computer implementation must

Original sample of FQHE

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satisfy and another additional two criteria for quantum communication. He showed that it is possible to realize qubits using neutral atoms and presented the traps for neutral atoms as well as the gates and architectures with similar system. According to Rainer, qubits can be encoded in the vibrational states of atoms in tight traps. He also showed mathematically and schematically how the atoms are being trapped using magnetic fields and the problems that may arise during the experimental realization. Experimental data from relevant literature was also shown.

Vlatko Vedral's lecture was about quantum correlations. He first gave an introduction to entanglement as defined by Schrodinger using the "Mean King Problem" as a case study. He touched on the LOCC (local operations and classical communications) which is a method in quantum informa-tion theory the result of a local operation performed on part of the system is "communicated classically to another part on which another local operation is also performed. He empha-sized that LOCC cannot increase entanglement and that if local unitary is done on two parties, then the entanglement should remain constant. He also showed mathematically that the entanglement of a separable state is zero. The final part of his lecture was about majorization and the higher forms of correlations (discord and coherence) which brought us to the topic of quantum macroscopicity.

Tomasz Paterek introduced the laws of quantum commu-nication which encompass information gain, information causality and entanglement gain. Using concepts in quantum information theory such as symmetry of conditional mutual information, positivity of mutual information and data

processing inequality, Tomasz mathematically proved an indisputable law of communication, that is, information gain is bounded by the communicated information. In layman terms this means that the amount of information received in a communication cannot exceed the amount of informa-tion being transmitted. The 2nd law, which is Information Causality states that information that a receiver can gain about a previously unknown set of data from his sender, by using all of his local resources (which may be correlated by the sender's resources) and m classical bits from the sender, cannot be greater than m. Information Causality excludes no-signalling (information cannot be transmitted faster than light) correlations which give access to too much remote data. Tomasz ended the session with the 3rd law which states that the increase of relative entropy of entanglement between two remote parties is bounded by the amount of non-classical correlations of the carrier with the parties as quantified by the relative entropy of discord.

The school ended with the lecture given by Lau Shau-Yu. He presented something completely different yet exciting which is the utilization of techniques in quantum optics, atom optics and laser cooling and trapping for precision measurement of various fundamental constants in classical physics such as Newton's gravitational constant G. He showed photos and schematic diagrams of how the experi-ment was done in other research groups and what his group is currently working on. According to Shau-Yu, the precision measurement method he studies is currently the most precise and accurate measurement of G ever present.

Speakers and participants of the Joint IAS-ICTP School on Quantum Information Processing.

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Event Highlights from HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study

Vision to Future Colliders

IAS Program on High Energy Physics4 – 29 Jan 2016

Building on the success of the same program in 2015, IAS co-organized again with the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for a one-month program on High Energy Physics, which attracted more than 100 participants for fruitful academic exchanges.

Apart from attendees of 2015, the program in 2016 welcomed a number of new faces from institutions in the US, Europe, Russia, Japan, Korea, mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Upon completion of 15 talks and

discussion sessions in the program as well as 60 talks and a forum session in the conference, participants were invited to contribute white papers to the particle physics community by documenting the physics goals, options of future colliders, and the reach of the related experiments. Similar to the program in 2015, papers submitted in 2016 are expected to be published by World Scientific in dedicated issues of the International Journal of Modern Physics A.

Experts in high energy physics came to HKUST from around the world and exchanged ideas in a panel discussion session.

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Ways to Manipulate Waves

IAS Winter School and Workshop on Advanced Concepts in Wave Physics: Topology and Parity-time Symmetries11 – 15 Jan 2016

To explore the application of modern concepts such as topological invariants and parity-time symmetry to the manipulation of wave, IAS organized a winter school and workshop on Advanced Concepts in Wave Physics: Topology and Parity-time Symmetries.

In additional to the 10 lectures covering topological concepts, parity-time symmetry notions and their applica-tions to physics of waves given by renowned physicists, over 30 talks were delivered by the speakers. Young scientists also seized the occasion to share their research with program participants through poster display and presentations. The ample discussions among participants during the program not only facilitated the exchange of research ideas, but also promoted more research collaborations across institutions.

When Condensed Matter Meets Cold Atom

IAS Program and Croucher Conference on Topological Phases in Condensed Matter and Cold Atomic Systems11 – 19 Dec 2015

The search for topological phases and the study of their properties have become two of the most important topics in condensed matter physics and cold atomic gases in recent years. The IAS Program and Croucher Conference on Topological Phases in Condensed Matter and Cold Atomic Systems held last Fall provided a platform for physicists and researchers from both fields to get together to share their research insights and experiences.

Around 140 participants joined the 9-day event and over 60 talks were delivered. Recent developments in topological insulators, topological crystalline insulators, Majorana fermions and nodal topological phases such as 3D Dirac and Weyl semimetals were covered in the Condensed Matter session while artificial magnetic field, spin-orbit coupling, novel optical lattices and quantum fluids were discussed in the Cold Atom session.

Reproduced with permission from HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study.

Participants shared their research ideas and findings during the poster display and presentation session.

Conferees enjoyed the conversation with Prof Patrick A. Lee (right), IAS Visiting Professor and organizing committee member of the conference.

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Highlights from the Asia Pacific Region

Fig. 1. (Color Online) A simplest illustration of the exact holographic mapping [3]. The original system consists of the 23 = 8 sites in the top row. An unitary transform acts on the Hilbert spaces on each pair of these sites and separates them into high energy (UV, red) and low energy (IR, blue) degrees of freedom. The high energy degrees of freedom forms the first (n = 1) layer of the dual system, while the low energy degrees of freedom form the input to the next iteration of unitary transformation. This is repeated until there is no more pair to be iterated. The result is a rearrangement of the original system into a dual system with layers of different energy scales arranged in a pyramid-like fashion.

Fig. 2. Left) A sketch of a topological insulator region in the 3D holographic dual corresponding to a 2D quantum anomalous Hall system with a very small gap. Right) Plot of the gap of onsite correlator in the presence of an entanglement cut at the nth layer. The background color density represents the Chern number density, with the two distinct left and right peaks at the scales of lattice regularization and Dirac cone gap respectively. Evidently, the correlator is gapless only if the cut is made between the two peaks, where the Z2 index is purportedly nontrivial.

Holographic Topological InsulatorTopological Insulators are novel materials that possess robust conducting surfaces or edges despite being bulk insulators. Conceptually, they are interesting because their surface or edge states are protected by the topological properties of their bulk bandstructure. From a technological standpoint, they are also exciting due to their potential as dissipationless wire

interconnects in nanoscale circuits and spintronics devices [1]. So far, the three types of topological insulators that have been experimentally realized are the 2D quantum spin Hall (QSH), 2D quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) and the 3D time-reversal invariant Z2 topological insulator, for instance, in HgTe quantum wells, Cr-doped BiSeTe thin films and BiSb.

Parallel to these advances in topological insulators is the intense interest of holographic duality in the theoretical physics community. First proposed by Witten, Maldacena, Klebanov and others in 1998, it is also known as the Anti-de-Sitter space/Conformal Field Theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence. Its principal idea is that a quantum field on a fixed background geometry can be regarded as a "hologram" containing the same information as a "dual" gravitational system one dimension higher. As the extra emergent dimension in the dual system has the physical interpretation of scale, holographic duality enables the scaling behavior of the original system to be understood in terms of spatial dynamics in the dual spacetime. The best understood example of holographic duality is the corre-spondence between 4-dimensional super-Yang-Mills theory and 5-dimensional supergravity, where the strongly-coupled limit of the super-Yang-Mills theory corresponds to the clas-sical (weakly-coupled) limit of the dual gravitational theory. In a similar flavor, holographic duality has also been fervently employed in the study of strongly-coupled condensed matter systems like quantum critical heavy Fermion systems and putative high-temperature superconductors. Indeed, by

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providing an alternative route to understanding the elusive behavior of strongly-coupled systems, holographic duality is a quintessential example of the symbiosis between high energy physics and condensed matter physics.

Presented with illustrious developments in these two directions, it is natural to ask what holography can teach us about topology. A rst step was made in [2], where a systematic holographic decomposition of a lattice system was developed. This approach, known as the exact holographic mapping (EHM), allows one to write down the holographic dual of any given lattice system through repeated applications of unitary mappings (see Fig. 1). This dual possesses a Hilbert space identical to that of the original system, but is arranged in layers representing different energy scales.

In the spirit of holography in high energy physics, one can define the classical geometry of the dual system by identifying the geodesic distance between two points on it with the upper bound of their corresponding correlation functions. As detailed in [2] and [3], this upper bound is given by the mutual information between the corresponding causal cones of the two points in the original system. One finds the duals of a critical zero temperature and nonzero temperature fermionic system being Anti-de-Sitter (AdS) space and the Bañados, Teitelboim and Zanelli (BTZ) black hole respectively, in agreement with expectations from other approaches in AdS-CFT.

Very interestingly, the exact holographic mapping (EHM) also provides another way of understanding the relationship between different types of topological insulators. Specifically, applying the EHM onto an almost gapless 2D quantum anomalous Hall (Chern) insulator results in a dual system containing a 3D time-reversal breaking Z2 topological insu-lator region (Fig. 2). This can be understood as follows. A 2D Chern insulator is characterized by one or more Dirac cones in momentum space, while a 3D Z2 topological insulator has an odd number of Dirac cones on its spatial surfaces. Each lattice Dirac cone carries a topological flux (Chern number) of one, with half residing near its singularity and the other half arising from lattice regularization. If a Dirac cone is almost gapless, the scale of the singularity will be much smaller than that of lattice regularization. In this case, the EHM separates these two contributions into two distinct Dirac cone regions in the emergent scale direction of the dual system. The region between these Dirac cones can be identified with a bona-de Z2 topological insulator, as justified in [4] by comparing entanglement spectra. At a deeper level, this reveals the helical surface states of the 3D topological insulator as direct manifestations of the parity anomaly of 2+1-D Dirac cones. Mathematically, one identifies the Berry

curvature density distribution in the dual system with the gradient of the θ-angle of the effective Axion topological field theory.

Indeed, the application of the EHM on topological insula-tors has gone beyond traditional studies restricted to the correspondence between critical theories and AdS spacetime. It forges a suggestive relationship between the two bulk-edge correspondences that has created much excitement in the physics community: Holographic Duality which relates a conformal field theory on the edge with a gravitational theory in the bulk, and Topological bulk-edge correspondence which relates a conformal field theory on the edge with a nontrivial topological invariant from the bulk states.

[1] X. Zhang and S.-C. Zhang, SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing, 837309 (2012). [2] X.-L. Qi, arXiv preprint arXiv:1309.6282 (2013). [3] C. H. Lee and X.-L. Qi, Physical Review B 93, 035112 (2016). [4] Y. Gu, C. H. Lee, X. Qi, and et. al., to be submitted..

Dr Ching-Hua LeeAstar and Stanford University

Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino ExperimentDaya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment (hereinafter referred to as “Daya Bay Experiment”) is based in Guangdong Province, China. Its main objective is to look for a new kind of neutrino oscillation and precisely measure its oscillation amplitude – denoted by the parameter sin22θ13 – using electron antineutrinos generated from nuclear reactors.

The experiment built a 3 km tunnel and 3 underground experimental halls very close to reactors, from 400m to 1600m. In each experimental hall, there is a water pool in which, two to four neutrino detector modules are installed, as shown in Fig.1. The civil construction of the experi-ment started in October 2007, and data taking started on December 24, 2011.

On March 8, 2012, the Daya Bay Collaboration announced that a new kind of neutrino oscillation (corresponding to neutrino mixing angle θ13) is discovered. Its measured oscil-lation amplitude is 9.2%, with an error of 1.7%. The statistics significance of this observation is 5.2 standard deviation, corresponding to a probability of one part per ten million for null oscillation (Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 171803(2012)). This result revealed a basic property of neutrinos and opened a gateway towards the understanding of the “mystery of matter-antimatter asymmetry”. It was selected into the top

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Fig. 1. Top view of the experiment hall: 4 neutrino detectors are in a water Cherenkov detector pool, with RPC detectors visible at the far end.

Fig. 2. Regions allowed at the 68.3%, 95.5% and 99.7% confidence levels by the Daya Bay experiment. The best estimate were sin22θ13 = 0.084±0.005 and |Δm2

ee| = (2.42±0.11)×10-3 eV2(black point)

ten scientific breakthroughs of the year 2012 by the U.S. "Science" magazine.

In 2013, Daya Bay reported the first direct measurement of the electron antineutrino mass-squared difference (Δm2

ee). This result is consistent with Δm2

μμ measured by muon neutrino disappearance, and will improve our understanding of the subtle details of neutrino oscillations (Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 061801 (2014)).

In 2014, based on 217 days of day taken with 6 detectors, combined with 404 days of data taken with all 8 detectors, Daya Bay improved the precision of θ13 and Δm2

ee by almost a factor of two, reaching 6% and 5%, respectively (Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 111802 (2015), Fig.2). A search for light sterile neutrino mixing was performed and a new limit is given. Another independent analysis using neutrons captured on hydrogen also obtained θ13 measurement with a statistical significance of 4.6 standard deviations (Phys. Rev. Lett.113, 141802 (2014)).

In 2015, Daya Bay reported its first measurement of the reactor antineutrino spectrum, and observed an excess of neutrinos around 6MeV compared to the prediction. The

local significance is greater than 4 standard deviations. This result provided new evidence to the study of the so-called Reactor Antineutrino Anomaly, and to the improvement of the reactor antineutrino model (Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 061801 (2016)).

Daya Bay experiment will continue its data taking until 2020, to improve the accuracy of sin22θ13 which is very important to neutrino physics, astrophysics, cosmology and other frontier of sciences.

Lei LiuInstitute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Exploring the Universe in a New LightThis historic press release for the event named GW150914 from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration marks a turning point in the history of astronomy:

“The gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA.”

The new era of gravitational wave astronomy that begins with the LIGO detection will enable us to see the universe, literally, in a new light.

Our Understanding of Gravity

Newton formulated the inverse square law of gravitation. It had the mysterious feature that if the source of gravity were to move, its effect would be felt instantaneously on objects even when they are separated by celestial distances. We now understand that this is only approximately true when the motions are slow compared to the speed of light which is true in the solar system and hence the success of Newton’s law.

Einstein’s special theory of relativity posited that the finite speed of light (i.e. of electromagnetic waves) is the same for all observers in constant relative motion and limits the speed at which physical influences can be transmitted. Noting that this conflicted with Newton’s instantaneous law, Einstein embarked on a heroic quest for the relativistic laws of gravity.

This culminated in the General Theory of Relativity (GTR) whose complete equations were presented to the Prussian Academy in Berlin on 25th November 1915, now more than 100 years ago. GTR was revolutionary because it

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changed our conception of space and time. In General Rela-tivity space-time is no longer the passive stage for physical events that it was for Newton - they are equal actors in the drama of physical events. Einstein’s equations tell you that matter (or energy in general) stresses and curves space-time as if it were an elastic medium. In this framework, the sun curves the space-time around it and the earth responds to that curvature and moves in the straightest possible path in this curved geometry. The orbits are now corrected from the perfect ellipses of Newton though, in the solar system, this is significant only for Mercury. Einstein moreover predicted that light, having energy, would also be subject to bending and this has indeed been measured, most dramatically in the gravitational lensing by massive galaxies. Einstein’s equations also form a framework for cosmology and give a quantitative understanding of the evolution and large-scale structure of the universe.

Black Holes and Gravitational Waves

One of the most remarkable predictions of Einstein’s theory, for which there is no Newtonian analogue, are black holes. Schwarzschild found the first such exact solution shortly after Einstein’s paper though its interpretation as a non-rotating black hole came much later. The Kerr solution describing the rotating case was found only about half a century later. The astrophysical significance of these solutions gradually emerged from the work of Oppenheimer and Snyder as well as S. Chandrasekhar’s work on neutron stars, which established the upper Chandrasekhar limit. It suggested that black holes might be the end point of stellar collapse. There is now astrophysical evidence for black holes, which range from a few solar masses to several million solar masses (at the centre of galaxies). Theoretically, what is remarkable about black holes are that they are pure curved geometries with no matter, yet carrying energy and angular momentum.

In 1916 Einstein himself predicted gravitational waves as solutions of the linearized version of his). These are small distortions of the ‘elastic medium’ of space-time that travel at the speed of light and are set off by the motion of massive objects in space-time. A good analogy is ripples of water waves set off by a pebble thrown into a still pond, except that space-time is very stiff (since Newton’s gravitational constant is small) and it needs large masses and violent motions to bend it and set off measurable gravitational waves. Technically, it is the second time derivative of the quadrupole moment of a matter system that leads to gravitational radia-tion. Contrast this with electromagnetic radiation which is determined by the first time derivative of the dipole moment

of a charge distribution.Both of these novel predictions of GTR entered into

the LIGO detection of September 14, 2015. Based on the observed signal and the theoretical framework that interprets it, what LIGO observed, were exactly these gravitational waves set off by the merger of a system of binary black holes. Two mutually orbiting black holes of 29 and 36 solar masses were deduced to have merged into a spinning black hole of about 62 solar masses and spin about two-third of its maximal possible value. Thus, about 3 times the mass of the sun was radiated (according to Einstein’s formula m=E/c^2) as gravitational waves in a fraction of a second with a peak power output 50 times that of the whole visible universe! This merger was an enormous gravitational dynamo.

Unfortunately, from just two measurements at Hanford and Livingston, the exact location and time of the event have been hard to pinpoint. It happened roughly 1.3 billion years ago and has only been localised to a broad swathe of the sky in the southern hemisphere.

It was extremely fortunate that the merger of a black hole binary sourced the first detection of gravitational waves. This means that the spiraling into a merger is fully described by Einstein’s equations of general relativity, uncontaminated by the complications of astrophysical processes. This leads to a very clean prediction of the expected gravitational wave profile one would observe from the merger, which is in beautiful accord with what, has been measured (with a signal to noise ratio of 24).

There are roughly three stages that can be seen in the observed signal (Fig. 1 and 2). There is the initial inspiral where the two black holes are mutually orbiting but rapidly spiraling in towards each other. In this regime the gravitational wave emission is modelled using the so-called post-Newtonian approximation scheme, taken to fairly high orders. Then there is the merger stage, which is a compli-cated non-linear regime of Einstein’s equations when the two objects coalesce. Here the emission and its profile are studied using numerical relativity techniques and matching with the signal is a test of general relativity in the strong field and non-linear regime. Finally, the last stage of emission is from the small wobbles as the black hole settles into the final Kerr solution. This is called the ringdown stage, like the fading chimes of a bell that has been struck, and can be studied analytically.

We can make an order of magnitude estimate of the time scales involved in the ringdown since the only scale that characterises the final black hole is the mass (if the angular momentum is comparable to the mass, in appropriate units, as appears to be the case here). According to general

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relativity, a solar mass black hole (2x10^{30} kgs}) has a Schwarzschild radius of about 3kms. Since the final black hole involved in the event has a Schwarzschild radius of ~200 kms the time scale associated with the ring down is t=R/c~10^{-3} secs. The merger that preceded it was over a period of a few tens of milliseconds. The strong damping in the ringdown signal is a signature of it being a black hole and not a compact stellar body.

Gravitational Waves and Astronomy

Astrophysically, the significance of the LIGO observation lies in it providing, for the first time, strong evidence for a binary system of black holes, individually of several tens of solar masses. Such systems were suspected to exist but had not been “seen”. What had been seen were binaries of pulsars slowly orbiting around each other and losing energy through gravitational radiation. The expected decrease in their orbital periods had been beautifully measured by Joseph Taylor over several decades, on the binary system he had discovered with Russell Hulse, thus indirectly confirming the existence of gravitational radiation. But in their direct detection we are already “seeing” new objects in the universe, which we would, previously never have had access to.

Our telescopes have been seeing the universe, since Galileo, with waves from the electromagnetic spectrum like light, x-rays, radio waves and gamma rays. Such waves are produced by the acceleration of electrically charged particles. However, electromagnetic waves (like electric and magnetic fields themselves) can be shielded! The main reason being that electric charges can cancel to zero. A familiar effect is microwaves being screened from emerging out of the microwave oven! Thus the light from the primordial universe before the era when it was an ionised plasma does not make it to us! But gravitational waves can see farther back in time and we hope to see signatures of their presence in ongoing experiments. Besides there are likely to be many dramatic phenomena like black hole mergers which are not accompanied by electromagnetic radiation and hence invisible to us. It is the prospect of overcoming both these kinds of limitations to our sight that makes gravitational wave astronomy exciting.

There are many different kinds of gravitational wave observatories both current and planned. They range from the two LIGO detectors and the VIRGO observatory in Italy and planned ones in Japan and LIGO-India to the ambitious space based eLISA. The instruments at these observatories are Michelson type laser interferometers. (Alternative methods for detection exist based on pulsar timing arrays

Fig. 1. Schematic illustration of the three stages of black hole binary merger and the expected gravitational waveform (taken from P. Abbott et.al. [1])

Fig. 2. Comparison of the actual signals observed at the two LIGO detectors with the expected waveform (taken from P. Abbott et.al. [1])

Fig. 3. Supercomputer simulation of the merger of two black holes. The expected gravitational-wave signal from this process is shown below. (Photo source: SXS Collaboration/black-holes.org)

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and are sensitive to very low frequencies). Gravitational waves from realistic astrophysical sources are very weak and their wavelengths are from a few hundred to a few thousand kilometers. When they pass through the earth they distort the geometry of space-time and in particular affect the two arms of the interferometer differently and that would be presently detectable if we achieve a sensitivity that is one ten thousandth of the size of the atomic nucleus! i.e. 10^{-18}meters. This is why the interferometers have arms that are approximately 4 km. long for LIGO and upto a million km for the proposed eLISA. Efforts in perfecting the high technology instruments are now on for nearly 2 decades. LIGO operates in the frequency band 40-10,000 hertz and aLIGO (advanced LIGO) operates down to 10 hertz. Because these detectors are omnidirectional instruments it is hard to localize the sources of the gravitational waves from just one detector. This is why the presence of a third LIGO detector somewhere in the eastern hemisphere is crucial for gravitational wave astronomy. The good news is that the Govt of India has given an in-principle approval for setting up this facility in India. On 31st March this year, an MOU was signed to this effect between the NSF and DAE-DST for LIGO-India.

The LIGO Science Collaboration – is a worldwide consortium of over 1000 scientists at about 90 institutions. From the Asia-Pacific region, there are a total of sixteen participating institutions. Of these eight are in India as part of the IndiGo consortium, four from Australia and two each from China and South Korea.

The IndIGO consortium, which has been doing the spadework for LIGO-India, was formed in 2009 with B. Iyer (currently at ICTS-TIFR, Bangalore) as chairperson and T. Souradeep (IUCAA, Pune) as spokesperson. The establish-ment of this consortium and the push for LIGO-India is a consequence of a strong historical tradition of gravitational wave research in India. The ringdown phase that we mentioned above was first calculated by C. V. Vishveshwara in 1970. Gravitational wave signals from orbiting black holes and compact objects were calculated by B. Iyer (then at RRI, Bangalore) and his collaborators in France. Sanjeev Dhurandhar working at IUCAA developed methods of data-analysis to detect the weak gravitational wave signals buried in noise. More recently P. Ajith (currently at ICTS-TIFR), while a PhD student, developed a phenomenological method for finding the waveforms of binary coalescing black holes.

The LIGO discovery will go down in history as the first step towards a turning point in astronomy. Mankind can now explore hitherto unknown and strange phenomena and in the future (perhaps distant) astronomers would be able to

`hear’ the murmur or rumble of the universe in the remote past after the big bang.

(Note: A version of this article has appeared in Current Science, 10 April 2016 issue)

[1] Abbott, B. et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2016, 116, 061102.

Rajesh Gopakumar & Spenta R. WadiaInternational Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Controlling Ultrafast Electrons in MotionAn international team has used the light produced by the Free Electron Laser FERMI at the research Centre Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste in the AREA Science Park to control the ultrafast movement of electrons. The experiment, published in the journal Nature Photonics, opens the way to the study of more complex processes which occur in nature on the scale of attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second), such as photosynthesis, combustion, catalysis and atmospheric chemistry.

Chemical, physical and biological processes are intrinsi-cally dynamic, because they depend not only on the atomic and electronic structure of matter, but also on how they evolve in time. Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel prize (1999) for "femtochemistry": the observation and control of dynamic chemical processes using ultrafast laser pulses, of a few millionths of a billionth of a second (femtoseconds). This is the scale of time on which atoms make or break bonds in

Scheme of the experiment: pulses of light (waves) emit electrons (green) from a neon atom (violet). (Image courtesy of Maurizio Contran, Department of Physics, Politecnico di Milano.)

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS


chemical or biological processes, such as photosynthesis or combustion.

Nature however can be still "faster". The atoms in a molecule move on the scale of femtoseconds, but the elec-trons, which are the basis of chemical bonds, are much faster and in the processes they cause, they move a thousand times faster, that is, tens or hundreds of attoseconds (a billionth of a billionth of a second).

"Like many in the scientific community", explains Kevin Prince, first author of the article just published, "we have also been working for years to develop innovative analytical methods with attosecond resolution to study and control fast dynamics. With this work, that exploits the exceptional properties of the laser light from FERMI, we can say we have finally achieved our goal."

The result was achieved by an international team of researchers from Italy (Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste, the Politecnico of Milano, the IFN, IOM and ISM institutes of CNR and ENEA), Japan (Tohoku University), Russia (Lomonosov Moscow State University), USA (Drake Univer-sity, Des Moines, Iowa) and Germany (Technical University of Berlin, University of Freiburg, European XFEL, Hamburg, Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Heidelberg).

They used a beam of light of two wavelengths (that is, two different colours) and managed to control the direction of emission of electrons ejected from an atom by the light. The experiment had a time resolution of 3 attoseconds, which now makes possible the study and control extremely fast processes.

"This result opens a new avenue to study and control ultrafast processes that involve electron motion on the time scale of attoseconds. We are dreaming about controlling more complex processes such as photocatalytic processes where the charge transfer plays a key role" said Kiyoshi Ueda, who with his group at Tohoku University, contributed to planning and conducting the experiment, and analysing the results.

Reproduced with permission from TOHOKU University.

Observation of High Temperature Superconductivity without Effect of MagnetismA research group led by the University of Tokyo, performing a process that removes oxygen impurities, has demonstrated that high-temperature superconductivity emerges in copper

oxides in a broader electron density region and at higher temperatures than previously thought.

The phenomenon of superconductivity, by which elec-trons flow through a substance without electrical energy being lost as heat energy, finds applications in maglev trains, magnetic resonance imaging devices and the like. Among superconducting materials, a group of copper oxides in particular exhibit superconductivity at high temperatures. However, the nature of superconductivity that these substances demonstrate differs depending on how the superconducting state was generated. Specifically, a different superconducting state can be generated by adding either negatively-charged electrons (“electron doping”) or positively-charged electron holes to an insulating material completely impervious to passing electricity. In particular, oxygen impurities are easily incorporated into the crystal structure of the material when creating a superconducting state by electron doping, stabilizing what is termed an antifer-romagnetic state, a kind of magnetism that was thought to prevent the emergence of superconductivity.

Professor Atsushi Fujimori and graduate student Mr. Masafumi Horio at the University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Science, Department of Physics, and their colleagues applied reduction-annealing, a type of heat treatment for removing oxygen impurities, to a high-temperature copper oxide superconductor created by electron doping. The group then directly observed the electron state of the supercon-ductor, and discovered that sufficient reduction-annealing eliminates antiferromagnetism and enables the emergence of a high-temperature superconducting state that is stable over a much wider electron-concentration range and up to a higher temperature than previously reported.

“This finding concerning the influence of antiferromag-netism induced by impurities on the superconducting state challenges the conventional picture of the physics underlying superconductivity, and calls for an experimental and theo-retical reexamination of the phenomenon,” says Professor Fujimori. He continues, “Thirty years have passed since the discovery of copper oxide high-temperature superconduc-tors, yet the mechanism by which superconductivity emerges in these materials remains unknown. This outcome will bring about a new approach to the study of the mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity.”

This research was carried out in collaboration with Professor Tadashi Adachi at Sophia University, Professor Koike at Tohoku University, and the High-Energy Accel-erator Research Organization (KEK).

The unique linear and nonlinear optical properties and low losses make dielectric nanoparticles perfect candidates

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS


Changes in electronic structure induced by reduction annealingTop: Fermi surface (contour surface of electron energy) before reduction annealing (left) and band dispersion in direction of arrow (right). A band gap, that is, an energy region where electrons do not exist, opens due to antiferromagnetism. Bottom: Fermi surface of reduction-annealed sample (left) and band dispersion in direction of arrow (right). The influence of antiferromagnetism was eliminated and the band gap disappeared.© 2016 Masafumi Horio.

for a design of high-performance nanoantennas, low-loss metamaterials, and other novel all-dielectric nanophotonic devices. The reported results will pave a way to establishing novel efficient platforms of nanoscale resonant nonlinear optical media driven by optically-induced magnetic response of low-loss high-index nanoparticles.

Reproduced with permission from University of Tokyo.

Spin Dynamics in an Atomically Thin Semi-conductorResearchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Yale-NUS College have established the mechanisms for spin motion in molybdenum disulfide, an emerging two-dimensional (2D) material. Their discovery resolves a research question on the properties of electron spin in single layers of 2D materials, and paves the way for the next generation of spintronics and low-power devices. The work was published online in the journal Physical Review Letters on 29 January 2016.

Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), a class of transition metal

dichalcogenide compounds, has attracted great attention due to wide recognition of its potential for manipulating novel quantum degrees of freedom such as spin and valley. Due to its unique material properties, a single layer of MoS2 has the potential to be used for spin transistors, where both electric current and spin current can be switched on and off independently. Despite this potential for application, there have not been any experimental studies on the mechanism for spin dynamics in MoS2.

To address this gap, scientists from the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials at NUS used highly precise meas-urements of the classical and quantum motion of electrons to extract information on how long spins live in this new material.

The team of scientists led by Assistant Professor Goki Eda, co-leader of this study who is from the NUS Department of Physics and Department of Chemistry, thinned down a crystal of molybdenite, a mineral of MoS2, to less than one nanometer. Here, the electrons live in a purely 2D plane that is just one atom thick. The researchers then successfully injected a high density of electrons in this ultra-thin material to enable measurements in the quantum mechanical regime. Quantum transport measurements at low temperatures of 2 Kelvin (-271 degrees Celsius) revealed a surprising transition, where quantum mechanical wave interference switched from constructive to destructive with increasing magnetic field.

Mr Indra Yudhistira, a Research Associate with the NUS Department of Physics who is under the supervision of Assistant Professor Shaffique Adam, co-leader of the NUS study who is from Yale-NUS College and NUS Department of Physics, demonstrated that this crossover was caused by spin dynamics.

By comparing the theoretical and experimental results, the two research groups were able to extract spin lifetimes and also determine that the relaxation was driven by the Dyakonov-Perel type where electron spins live longer in dirtier samples.

“Aside from investigating the fundamental properties of low field magnetotransport in molybdenum disulfide, our team was able to establish the mechanism for spin scattering to reveal the properties of the electron spin,” said Dr Hennrik Schmidt, who was a Research Fellow working under the supervision of Asst Prof Eda when the study was conducted.

Commenting on the significance of the discovery, Asst Prof Adam noted that spin-based devices would generally lead to lower energy consumption as compared to conven-tional electronics. He explained, “The combination of MoS2

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS


being a semiconductor and the long spin lifetimes open up opportunities in spintronics, where the electron spin and not the electron charge is used to transport information. Such unconventional devices could allow for next generation low-power devices.”

Professor Yoshihiro Iwasa, Director of the Center for Quantum-Phase Electronics at the University of Tokyo, and a world expert on quantum devices who first reported superconductivity in this class of materials remarked, “2D materials have been anticipated as a promising platform for spintronics. I feel that this very comprehensive study of the analysis of the electron spin life time will provide crucial information for further pushing the research toward the realisation of a new generation of spintronic devices.”

Reproduced with permission from National University of Singapore.

New Spectroscopy of 10ΛBe Hypernucleus

Redefines the Reference Data of Lambda HypernucleiA team of international researchers has successfully meas-ured precise binding energy of a 10

ΛBe hypernucleus made of four protons (ρ), five neutrons (n) and and a Lambda (Λ) particle, at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab), USA.

The research team, known as HKS Collaboration, consists of 76 members from 21 institutes led by Tohoku University, Hampton University and Florida International University.

All materials are made of small charged particles: nuclei and electrons. A nucleus consists of protons and neutrons that are bound by the nuclear force against Coulomb repul-sion. Without the nuclear force, no material can exist stably. Therefore, understanding it is essential to knowing how our material world was created. A proton has positive charge and a neutron has no charge. Therefore the Coulomb force between proton-proton is repulsive and the Coulomb force does not work between neutron-neutron. However, it is widely known that the nuclear forces between proton-proton and neutron-neutron are almost the same and this is one of most basic features of the nuclear force. This is called as the charge symmetry of the nuclear force.

Modern physics is trying to understand the nuclear force as a part of a more general "baryonic force." A Lambda hyper-nucleus consists of a Lambda particle, the lightest baryon with strangeness, in addition to protons and neutrons, so the study of Lambda hypernuclei extends our knowledge of the

nuclear force to the more general "baryonic force".There have been long discussions about whether the

charge symmetry is also satisfied between Lambda-proton (Λρ) and Lambda-neutron (Λn) systems. Recent experi-mental studies have revealed that the charge symmetry is largely broken for light hypernuclei, 4

ΛH and 4ΛHe [1,2].

Though its origin is still under debate, comparison of the newly measured 10

ΛBe binding energy with that of its mirror hypernucleus 10

ΛB shows small charge symmetry breaking for heavier hypernuclei. Small charge symmetry breaking for 10

ΛBe − 10ΛB will shed light on the source of charge symmetry

breaking of the ΛΝ interaction. Furthermore, the existence of 0.54 MeV shift is suggested for the reported binding ener-gies of 12

ΛC which has been serving as the mass reference for various hypernuclei.

This shift would affect all reported hypernuclear binding energies calibrated with 12

ΛC and it has great impact on hypernuclear study.

Reproduced with permission from TOHOKU University.

The measured binding energy spectrum of 10ΛBe. Sharp peaks originating

from hypernuclei are clearlyobserved on accidental coincidence back-ground and quasi-freely produced Lambda events.

The magnetic spectrometers, HKS (High resolution Kaon Spectrometer) and HES (High resolution Electron spectrometer) used for the experiment. These spectrometers were constructed and tested in Japan and then shipped to JLab. (Credit: Tohoku University)

OBITUARY


XIE Jialin, an expert in accelerator physics and tech-nology and free electron lasers, a recipient of China's top science award and Academician of Chinese

Academy of Sciences, died on February 20th at the age of 96. Professor XIE was born in Harbin, Heilongjiang province

in August 1920. He graduated from Yanjing University in 1943 and moved to the United States for further study. At Caltech, XIE obtained his M.S. degree in physics in 1948, and in 1951 he received his PhD from Stanford University.

From 1951 to 1955, he worked at the microwave and high-energy physics laboratory at Stanford University. He was then in charge of building an accelerator at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, which was the highest-energy (45 MeV) medical accelerator in the world at that time.

In 1955, Prof. XIE decided to return to China. Although he faced many difficulties during that time, including a lack of proper equipment and up-to-date information, and even continuous exposure in a dangerous environment putting his life in danger at times, Prof. XIE was determined to go on with his research.

“These difficulties were nothing for someone who wished to achieve something important,” he said. Following successful prefabrication research on various components of an electron linear accelerator, such as an electron gun, accelerating tube, high-power pulse modulator, microwave system and high-power klystron, he built a 30-MeV electron linac in 1964, the first one ever built in China. The successful construction of China’s first high-energy electron linear particle accelerator led to Prof. XIE being awarded the Scien-tific and Technological Achievement Prize at the National Science and Technology Conference in 1978.

During the 1980s, he headed the design, manufacture and construction of the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider Project. He later led the development of the Beijing Free Electron Laser. He was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980. In 1990, XIE was awarded a Supreme Prize for National Science and Technology Progress.

On learning about the establishment of free electron lasers around the world – the latest development in the field of science and technology – XIE proposed the development of the Beijing Free Electron Laser and then worked out a

concrete scheme. Using funds provided in 1987 under the State 863 High Tech Program, he succeeded in building China’s first infrared free-electron laser, which produced spontaneous emission in May 1993; the lasing reached saturation at the end of 1993. Following those built in the US and western Europe, this was the first infrared free-electron laser built in Asia. In 1994, he was awarded the Supreme Prize for Science and Technology Progress by the CAS.

He has published over 40 scientific papers and several specialized publications. As an associate professor in univer-sities and institutes, Prof. XIE has mentored a great number of accelerator physicists.

In 2015, the International Astronomical Union announced that Minor Planet No. 32928 was named after Prof. XIE Jialin to commemorate Prof. XIE’s outstanding contributions in particle accelerator science. The Institute of High Energy Physics established a Youth Innovation Fund which was named the "XIE Jialin Fund."

Prof. XIE Jialin has long been at the forefront of accel-erator science and technology research and made a great contribution to the sustainable development of China's high-energy physics and particle accelerator research. Prof. XIE is a role model for all science and technology workers, and the XIE Jialin star in the sky will keep shining and inspiring us long into the future.

Reproduced with permission from The Chinese Academy of Sciences. (http://english.cas.cn/)

China's Accelerator Physicist XIE Jialin (谢家麟) Dies at Age 96

CONFERENCE CALENDAR


Upcoming Conferences in the Asia Pacific Region

JUNE 2016

The 8th International Kasetsart University Science and Technology Annual Research SymposiumDate: 2 - 3 June, 2016Location: Bangkok, ThailandOrganizers: Faculty of Science, Kasesart University

The International Kasetsart University Science and Technology Annual Research Symposium (I-KUSTARS) will provide an excellent international forum for sharing knowledge and results in theory, methodology and applications of Natural Science and Applied Science. The symposium looks for significant contributions to all major fields of Science and Technology in theoretical and practical aspects. The aim of the symposium is to provide a platform for the researchers and students to meet and share cutting-edge development in the field of science and technology.

Stochastic Processes in the Cell CycleDate: 13 - 17 June, 2016Location: Jerusalem, IsraelOrganizers: Ariel Amir (Harvard University ), Nathalie Q. Balaban (The Hebrew University) and Naama Barkai (Weizmann Institute of Science)

The workshop will host a small group of scientists from Physics, Mathematics, Biology and Computer Science. By allowing significant amounts of time for discussions rather than talks, we hope to encourage the initiation of novel collaborations between the participants, and a real exchange of ideas across disciplines.

ICPCO 2016 2nd International Conference on Power Control and OptimizationDate: 15–17 June 2016Location: Chongqing, ChinaOrganizers: ICPCO

ICPCO conference is one of the leading international conferences for presenting novel and fundamental advances in the fields of Power Control and Optimization. ICPCO also serves to foster communication among researchers and

practitioners working in a wide variety of scientific areas with a common interest in improving Power Control and Optimization related techniques.

ICMMR 2016 3rd International Conference on Mechanics and Mechatronics ResearchDate: 15–17 June 2016Location: Chongqing, ChinaOrganizers: ICMMR

2016 3rd International Conference on Mechanics and Mechatronics Research (ICMMR 2016) is the main annual research conference aimed at presenting current research being carried out. The idea of the conference is for the scientists, scholars, engineers and students from the Universities all around the world and the industry to present ongoing research activities, and hence to foster research relations between the Universities and the industry.

14th International Symposium on Nuclei in the Cosmos XIVDate: 19–24 June 2016Location: Toki Messe, Niigata, JapanOrganizers: National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science

Nuclei in the Cosmos is the foremost bi-annual symposium of nuclear physics, astrophysics, astronomy, cosmo-chemistry, and other related fields that started from Wien in Austria in 1990. NIC-XIV http://nic2016.jp/ is jointly organized by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science. It is sponsored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), and supported by several institutions.

CLOUDY WorkshopDate: 20–24 June 2016Location: Shandong, ChinaOrganizers: Shandong University

The workshop will cover observation, theory, and apply Cloudy to a wide variety of astronomical environments, including the interstellar medium, AGB stars, Active Galactic Nuclei, Starburst

galaxies, and the intergalactic medium. The lectures and hands-on sessions will be carried out by Gary Ferland. The sessions will consist of a mix of textbook study, using Osterbrock & Ferland, Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae and Active Galactic Nuclei, and application of Cloudy. Participants will break up into small teams and organize research projects of mutual interest.

18th International Congress on Plasma Physics (ICPP) – 2016Date: 27 June–1 July 2016Location: Kaohsiung Exhibition Center in Kaohsiung, TaiwanOrganizers: Institute of Space and Plasma Sciences, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan

The scope of ICPP is to discuss the recent progress and to establish a view on the future of plasma science, covering a wide range of aspects on fundamental plasma physics, fusion plasmas, astrophysical plasmas and plasma applications.

JULY 2016

OptoElectronics and Communications Conference /International Conference on Photonics in SwitchingDate: 3–7 July 2016Location: Niigata, JapanOrganizers: Optical Society (OSA)

Topics of this conferece including, not limited too: 1. Core/Access Networks and Switching Subsystems. 2. Transmission Systems and their Subsystems. 3. Optical Fibers, Cables and Fiber Devices. 4. Optical Active Devices and Modules. 5. Optical Passive Devices and Modules. 6. Optical Switching System and Related Technologies.

SUSY (Supersymmetry) 2016Date: 4–8 July 2016Location: Melbourne, AustraliaOrganizers: ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale (CoEPP)

The goal of the conference is to review and discuss recent progress in theoretical, phenomenological, and experimental aspects of supersymmetric

CONFERENCE CALENDAR


theories and other approaches to physics beyond the Standard Model of particles and interactions. SUSY is one of the world's largest international meetings devoted to new ideas in fundamental particle physics.

International Workshop on “Fundamental Science and Society”Date: 7-8 July 2016Location: Quy Nhon, VietnamOrganizers: the Ministry for science and technology of Vietnam, the Popular Committee of the Province of Binh Dinh, the “Rencontres du Vietnam” and the “Rencontres de Moriond”

The workshop will be structured around round tables addressing various historical, current and future issues relevant to fundamental science and society, with an opening up towards Asian countries, in particular towards developing countries around Vietnam and the themes proper to them.DAY 1: Science for the progress of knowledge and for development, with presentations and round tables on the role of fundamental research in technological revolutions on the one hand, and in sustainable development on the other hand.DAY 2: Science for peace with presentations and round tables on the themes of excellence, diversity and of their underlying value on the one hand, and of links between fundamental and applied research in the framework of open innovation on the other hand.

25th Annual International Laser Physics WorkshopDate: 11–15 July 2016Location: Yerevan, Republic of ArmeniaOrganizers: -

The annual international conference on laser physics that took the name International Laser Physics Workshop (LPHYS') has been established in 1991 following the joint initiative of a group of leading laser scientists in the former Soviet Union under the leadership of Professor Alexander M Prokhorov, a renowned Russian laser researcher and a 1964 Nobel Prize laureate in physics.

25th International Conference on Atomic PhysicsDate: 24–29 July 2016Location: Seoul, KoreaOrganizers: -

The conference will present an outstanding program of invited speakers and the topics encompass forefront research subjects in the field of atomic physics, such as precision measurements (including atomic clocks and fundamental constants), quantum optics and cavity QED, ultracold atoms and molecules, Bose-Einstein condensates, degenerate Fermi gases, optical lattices, quantum computing with atoms and ions, mesoscopic quantum systems, and ultrafast and intense field interactions.

AUGUST 2016

33rd International Conference on the Physics of SemiconductorsDate: 31 July –5 August 2016Location: Beijing, ChinaOrganizers: -

ICPS 2016 continues a series of biennial conferences that began in the 1950's. ICPS is the premier meeting for reporting all aspects of semiconductor physics including electronic, structural, optical, magnetic and transport properties. The conference will reflect the state of art in the semiconductor physics and will serve as a forum where scholars, researchers, and specialists can interact to discuss future research directions and technological advancements.

Synthetic Topological Quantum MatterDate: 1–5 August 2016Location: Beijing, ChinaOrganizers: Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics China at the Chinese Academy of Sciences

The major objective of the KITPC/PKU conference is to bring together leading researchers working on the topological phases for ultracold atoms, as well as condensed matter (and photonic) systems, to report their latest findings in this area, and investigate the new issues particularly connecting to the interacting or non-linear systems. The main topics of this conference include new experimental and theoretical results of synthetic spin-orbit coupling and gauge fields, quantum anomalous Hall effect, topological superfluid, topological flat band, Dirac and Weyl semimetals, topological superconductors, topological insulators, and topological Kondo physics.

Spin-orbit-coupled quantum gasesDate: 1–19 August 2016Location: Beijing, ChinaOrganizers: Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics China at the Chinese Academy of Sciences

It is a KITPC Program. Its main objective is to bring together leading researchers working in a rapidly developing area of Spin-orbit-coupling (SOC) for quantum gases. In addition to leading theorists, the Program will attract prominent experimentalists working on the SOC, synthetic gauge fields and related areas for ultracold atomic gases. This will help to stimulate the work on the realization of a new generation of experiments with SOC in Bose and Fermi gases, in which the many-body effects play an essential role.

IEEE International Conference on Group IV PhotonicsDate: 24–26 August 2016Location: Shanghai, ChinaOrganizers: IEEE

The conference will feature an exciting program with presentations organized in three topical sessions covering the breadth of Group-IV photonic research and spanning the range from scientific curiosity and fundamental discovery to advanced applications and commercialization. A special industry forum session is also planned with solicited presentations from key industry players in the field. Plenary presentations by leading authorities of the international photonics community will provide an insightful update on the state of the world photonics R&D and market, and address hot topics in the field.

ICOSM 2016 International Conference on Sustainable MaterialsDate: 25–27 August 2016Location: Chengdu, ChinaOrganizers: ICOSM

The event has the objective of creating an international forum for academics, researchers and scientists from worldwide to discuss worldwide results and proposals regarding to the soundest issues related to MATERIALS.

CONFERENCE CALENDAR


APPN CONFERENCE CALENDAR welcomes conference information in the Asia Pacific Region. To submit, send e-mail to [email protected]

SEPTEMBER 2016

International Conference on Molecule-Based MagnetsDate: 4–8 September 2016Location: Sendai, JapanOrganizers: Tohoku University

ICMM is the largest conference related to the molecule-based magnets. We anticipate fruitful discussions on the latest topics during several plenary, keynote, and invited lectures and poster presentations. In addition, there will be pre- and post-conferences for young researchers: “Rising Star Symposium” and senior researchers.

International Conference of Near-Field Optics, Nanophotonics and Related TechniquesDate: 4–8 September 2016Location: Hamamatsu, JapanOrganizers: Shizuoka University

NFO has been held every second year since 1992 at Besancon, France and NFO is now the most established and outstanding conference focused on near-field optics, nanophotonics, plasmonics, related techniques, and interdisciplinary network of scientists. Following the tradition of NFO conference, NFO-14 will provide great opportunities for information exchange and creation of new science and technologies.

International Conference on Highly Frustrated Magnetism (HFM)Date: 7–11 September 2016Location: Taipei, TaiwanOrganizers: HFM

This international conference will be a great opportunity for scientists from around the world to share the most recent developments in the study of frustration in magnets. It will feature presentations reporting on experimental and theoretical studies of magnetic frustration, in all of its manifestations.

International Iran Conference on Quantum InformationDate: 8–11 September 2016Location: Tehran, Iran, Islamic Republic ofOrganizers: Sharif University of Technology

The conference will feature the latest developments in theoretical and experimental quantum information science, feature talks by leading international researchers, and provide the opportunity for research discussions and collaborations between international and Iranian quantum information researchers.

26th International Nuclear Physics Conference (INPC2016)Date: 11–16 September 2016Location: Adelaide, AustraliaOrganizers: Centre for the Subatomic Structure of Matter at the University of Adelaide, the Australian National University and ANSTO

The Conference is organized by the Centre for the Subatomic Structure of Matter at the University of Adelaide, together with the Australian National University and ANSTO. It is also sponsored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and by a number of organisations, including AUSHEP, BNL, CoEPP, GSI and JLab. INPC 2016 will be held in the heart of Adelaide at the Convention Centre on the banks of the River Torrens. It will consist of 5 days of conference presentations, with plenary sessions in the mornings, up to ten parallel sessions in the afternoons, poster sessions and a public lecture.

Tsinghua-NTU joint workshop on Quantum MaterialsDate: 19–20 September 2016Location: Beijing, China Organizers: Tsinghua University & Nanyang Nanyang Technological University

Following the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding by NTU and Tsinghua University in 2007, the Tsinghua-NTU Joint Workshop on Quantum Materials is the sixth in the series of workshops organized by both universities to strengthen the collaboration and promote synergy between the two institutions.

12th China Singapore Joint Symposium on Research Frontiers in PhysicsDate: 22–24 September 2016Location: Hefei, China Organizers: NTU, NUS & USTC

The Singapore-China Joint Symposium on research frontiers in physics is a traditional forum and has become a regular event for physicists from China and Singapore to present and discuss their latest research advances in various fields of physics. It is jointly organised by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (SPMS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the Physics Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

2016 the 4th Int. Conf. on Optical and Photonic Engineering (icOPEN 2016)Date: 26–30 September 2016Location: Chengdu, ChinaOrganizers: icOPEN 2016

Following the success of icOPEN2015 in Singapore, OPSS is proud to bring this well received conference to Chengdu, China for the first time. icOPEN2016 will provide a timely platform to conduct a recap of the latest technologies and industry milestones, and promote optical and photonic engineering to a wider audience.

NOVEMBER 2016

Aggregation Induced EmissionDate: 18–20 November 2016Location: Guangzhou, ChinaOrganizers: Royal Society of Chemistry

The themes of this conference includes New and efficient fluorescent and phosphorescent luminogens; Advance functional luminogens in the solid-state; Biomedical applications of luminogens; Optoelectronic devices of high efficient luminogens in the solid state.

JOBS


NON-MEMBER STATE POSTDOC FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMME (THEORETICAL PHYSICS)

Work Location: Meyrin, Switzerland

Company/Institute: CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research

At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature.

The instruments used at CERN are purpose-built particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before the beams are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN laboratory sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe's first joint ventures and now has 21 member states.

Job Description: The Non-Member State Fellowship Programme in Theoretical Physics awards two postdoctoral fellowships per year. They are granted for two years and can exceptionally be extended to a third year.

Requirements: Applicants should NOT be a national of a CERN Member State. Nationals from the CERN Member States (irrespective of their current place of study and/or residence) should apply to the 'standard' Fellowship Programme (link is external).

Have a PhD in Theoretical Physics (or are about to finish your thesis) and are looking for a postdoctoral position.

Have a maximum of 10 years of research experience after the degree which gives access to doctoral programmes (MSc or equivalent).

How to apply: The application and ALL supporting documents should reach CERN (or be submitted using the e-recruitment system) by the closing date (15/10/2016). Candidates should upload their documents such as their curriculum vitae, publications, research interests etc. directly into our e-recruitment system (e-RT). Recommendation letters can also be uploaded directly or sent to the Recruitment Service by email, fax or postal mail (contact details are available here). Candidates will receive an automatic email when these documents are attached to their application.

Documents required

• acompletedelectronicapplicationform

• aCurriculumVitae

• alistofpublicationsifrelevant(forcollaborations,pleaseindicatesimplythe number of publications and only provide details of the most important ones)

• aphotocopyofthelast(highest)qualification

• ashort(halfpage)descriptionofyourmotivationforcomingtoCERN

• threelettersofrecommendationtogiveasbroadaspossibleoverviewofyour academic and/or professional achievements

• Ashortdescriptionofyourresearchinterests

RESEARCH FACULTY (ATOMIC PHYSICS AND OPTICAL SCIENCE)

Work Location: Taiwan

Company/Institute: The Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences in Academia Sinica

In the early 1980s the founders of the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences (IAMS) had the vision to see the great potential of advanced instruments such as high precision lasers and synchrotron radiation light sources together with pulsed molecular beams, ionization techniques, and ultrahigh vacuum surface techniques in elucidating the structures of atoms and molecules and the dynamics and energetics of the interaction among atoms and molecules. They proposed to establish an Institute to complement the research at the Institutes of Physics and Chemistry in the Academia Sinica. A preparatory office was initiated in 1982 headed by Dr. Chau-Ting Chang. Unfortunately in 1993 Dr. Chang passed away unexpectedly at a young age. Dr. Sheng-Hsien Lin assumed his responsibilities. In 1995 the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences was inaugurated as a full-fledged Institute in the Academia Sinica. Dr. Lin became the first Director, from 1995-2001. Dr. Kopin Liu took the helm from 2001-2004. Dr. Yuh-Lin Wang was appointed Director from 2004-2010. Dr. Mei-Yin Chou is the current Director since 2011.

Under the vision and leadership of Dr. Yuan T. Lee, former President of the Academia Sinica, and the previous Directors, the IAMS has grown to become a multi-disciplinary center of excellence in fundamental research. Today, research projects at the IAMS cover topics ranging from the spectroscopy and dynamics of molecules to the fabrication and analysis of advanced materials to the study of biophysics and the development of analytical tools for biomolecules. At present the Institute has grown into a unit with 30 full-time Research Fellows and 11 Adjunct Research Fellows in the following four research groups: (1) Advanced Materials and Surface Science, (2) Atomic Physics and Optical Science, (3) Biophysics and Bio-analytical Technology, and (4) Chemical Dynamics and Spectroscopy. There are over 200 visiting scientists, postdoctoral associates, students, and research assistants working in the Institute, including about 90 master and Ph.D. students. The Institute is also an avid participant in the Taiwan International Graduate Program (TIGP) within the Academia Sinica.

Job Description: One of the most prominent research institutes in Taiwan, the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences, Academia Sinica, invites qualified candidates to apply for tenure track research fellow (PI) positions in the following research fields: biophysical science, nano-science, surface science, molecular dynamics, atomic physics, ultrafast and high-field optics, and interdisciplinary field in physical chemistry or chemical physics.

Requirements: Candidates at the Assistant, Associate, and Full Research Fellow (equivalent to Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor) levels will be considered. They must have a Ph.D. degree and will be expected to develop an internationally recognized research program.

How to apply: Applicants should send a full CV by air-mail or e-mail, including a list ofpublications, a research proposal, and at least three letters of recommendation to:

JOBS


APPN JOBS accepts ads from organisations and individuals. To submit, send e-mail to [email protected]

Dr. Jung-Chi Liao, Room 202, P.O. Box 23-166, Institute of Atomic and Molecular Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei, 10617, Taiwan.

E-mail: [email protected]; Fax: (886) 2-2362-0200.

ADJUNCT FACULTY (INTRODUCTION TO APPLIED MATH AND PHYSICS)

Work Location: Singapore

Company/Institute: Singapore Institute of Technology

The Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) is Singapore's fifth autonomous university. Established in 2009, the university primarily caters to local polytechnic graduates who desire to pursue a bachelor's degree.

Vision

A leader in innovative university education by integrating learning, industry and community.

Mission

To develop individuals who build on their interests and talents to impact society by providing a nurturing environment that is uniquely enriched by world-class partners.

CoreValues

P: United in Purpose

R: Respect for Others

I: Uncompromising Integrity

D: Purposeful Dynamism

E: Relentless Pursuit of Excellence

Job Description: Module Synopsis: Introduction to Applied Math and Physics

We live in a world governed by physical laws. As a result we have become accustomed to objects’ motions being in accordance with these laws. This course examines the basic physics and mathematics governing natural phenomena, such as light, weight, inertia, friction, momentum, and thrust as a practical introduction to applied math and physics. Students explore geometry, trigonometry for cyclical motions, and physical equations of motion for bodies moving under the influence of forces. With these tools, students develop a broader understanding of the impact of mathematics and physics on their daily lives.

Requirements: The successful candidate must have a minimum of a master’s degree in an appropriate discipline and have prior teaching experience. Our ideal candidate must demonstrate an excitement about teaching, a commitment to student success, and a pattern of active professional development.

How to apply: To apply for this position, please complete the SIT Personal Information Form and email together with your resume to [email protected].

POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW

Work Location: Suwon-si, South Korea

Company/Institute: Sungkyunkwan University

For over six hundred years, Sungkyunkwan University has held an extraordinarily special place in the history of Korea. Sungkyunkwan’s contributions to the education and training of royal scholar-officials by preeminent Korean philosophers have laid the foundation for numerous national advancements. Since its establishment, the school’s educational tradition has emphasized the four principles of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom.

Sungkyunkwan University has also evolved to incorporate a modern educational paradigm that prioritizes cutting-edge research and innovative education. This has led to important advances in the arts, sciences, medicine, and technology in ways that allow greater synergy with other leading universities and institutions throughout the world.

Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics (CINAP) located at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) is founded in 2012 under the roof of Korea Institute for Basic Science (IBS) which is established mainly to secure creative knowledge and fundamental technology for the future through world-class basic science research in Korea. The CINAP goals are to perform outstanding research in the fields of fundamental and applied physics of low dimensional structures and to produce young scientists committed to nanophysics and nanoscience.

Job Description: CINAP is particularly interested in the broad basic research area of i) synthesis of 2D layered materials, ii) exciton dynamics and carrier multiplication, iii) photo-thermoelectricity, iv) nanostructure analysis, v) electrical/ optical/ magnetic measurements, and vi) computational modeling of nanostructures. The CINAP seeks for post-doctoral fellows as part of its plan to grow to a total of 60 research staffs.

Requirements: Required qualifications include a doctorate degree in physics, chemistry, engineering, applied physics or a related field. The successful candidate will be expected to have strong written and oral communication skills in English, and to perform independent IBS related researches, and to collaborate with other groups in the CINAP.

How to apply: Interested people should submit a letter of interest, a statement of research interests,andcurrentCV,andnameandemailofthreeormorereferences.

Submit your application package via e-mail [email protected] and cc to [email protected] and all inquiries related to the positions address to (Tel) 82-31-299-6507 and [email protected].

List of Physical Societies in the Asia Pacific Region

SOCIETIES


South East Asia Theoretical Physics Association (SEATPA)President: Phua Kok KhooAddress: Nanyang Executive Centre #02-18, 60 Nanyang View,

Singapore 639673E-mail: [email protected]://www.seatpa.org

Association of Asia Pacific Physics SocietiesPresident: Seunghwan Kim Address: Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics/POSTECH, 77Cheongam-Ro Nam-gu, POSTECH, Pohang, KoreaE-mail: [email protected]://www.aapps.org

Australian Institute of PhysicsPresident: Warrick CouchAddress: PO Box 546, East Melbourne, Vic. 3002E-mail: [email protected]://www.aip.org.au

Bangladesh Physical SocietyPresident: A. A. Ziauddin AhmadAddress: Dhaka Dhaka 1216 Bangladesh http://www.bdphs.org

Chinese Physical SocietyPresident: Zhan WenlongAddress: Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190E-mail: [email protected]: //www.cps-net.org.cn

Physical Society of Hong KongPresident: Ruiqin ZhangAddress: Department of Physics and Materials Science City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong E-mail: [email protected]://www.pshk.org.hk

Indian Physics AssociationPresident: S. L. ChaplotAddress: PRIP Shed, Room No. 4, B.A.R.C.,Trombay, Mumbai India 400085E-mail: [email protected]://www.ipa1970.org.in

Indian Physical SocietyPresident: Milan K. SanyalAddress: IACS Campus, 2A&B Raja Subodh Chandra Mullick Road,

Kolkata 700032, Indiahttp://www.iacs.res.in/ips

Indonesian Physical SocietyPresident: Masno GintingAddress: d/a Komplek Batan Indah Blok L No 48 Serpong Tangerang Banten

15314 IndonesiaE-mail: [email protected]://hfi.fisika.net

Israel Physical SocietyPresident: Yaron OzAddress: School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv UniversityE-mail: [email protected]://www.israelphysicalsociety.org

Physical Society of JapanPresident: FUJII YasuhikoAddress: Yushima Urban Building 8F, 2-31-22 Yushima, Bunkyo-ku,

Tokyo 113-0034, Japan E-mail: [email protected]://www.jps.or.jp

Japan Society of Applied PhysicsPresident: Satoshi KawataAddress: Osaka UniversityE-mail: [email protected]://www.jsap.or.jp

Korean Physical SocietyPresident: Y. P. LeeAddress: The Korean Physical Society, 635-4 Yeoksam-dong, Gangnam-gu,

Seoul 135-703, KoreaE-mail: [email protected]://www.kps.or.kr

Malaysian Institute of PhysicsPresident: Kurunathan RatnaveluAddress: INSTITUT FIZIK MALAYSIA (MALAYSIAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS) C/O Jabatan Fizik, Universiti Malaya, 50603 Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.E-mail: [email protected]://ifm.org.my/

Mongolian Physical SocietyPresident:Orlokh DorjkhaidavAddress: Institute of Physics and Technology Enkhtaivan avenue 54b, Bayanzurkh district, Ulaanbaatar 13330,

MongoliaE-mail: [email protected]://www.ipt.ac.mn/

SOCIETIES


Nepal Physical SocietyPresident: Pradeep Kumar BhattaraiAddress: Tri-Chandra Multiple Campus, Ghanta Ghar, Ranipokhari,

KathamnduEmail: [email protected]://www.nps.org.np

New Zealand Institute of PhysicsPresident: David HutchinsonAddress: Dodd-Walls Centre for Photonic & Quantum Technologies,

Department of Physics, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, 9054E-mail: [email protected]://nzip.org.nz/

Pakistan Physical SocietyPresident: M ZakaullahAddress: Room No 205, Technical Block, NCP, Islamabad, Shahdra Valley Road,

Islamabad 44000, PakistanE-mail: [email protected]://pps-pak.org/

Physical Society of PhilippinesPresident: Romeric PobreAddress: 3/F National Institute of Physics University of the Philippines, Diliman 1101 Quezon City, PhilippinesE-mail: [email protected]://www.spp-online.org/

Institute of Physics SingaporePresident: Sow Chorng HaurAddress: Institute of Physics, National University of Singapore, 2 Science Drive 3, Singapore 117542E-mail: [email protected]://www.physics.nus.edu.sg

Physical Society of the Republic of ChinaPresident: Minn-Tsong LinAddress: National Taiwan University, No.1 Sec. 4 Roosevelt Road, 10617 TaiwanE-mail: [email protected]://psroc.phys.ntu.edu.tw

Thai Physical SocietyPresident: AmonAddress: PO Box 217, Chiang Mai University, Muang District,

Chiang Mai 50202.E-mail: [email protected]://www.thps.org

National Committee of Russian PhysicistsPresident: Leonid V. KeldyshAddress: 119991 Moscow, Leninsky Prospekt, 32aE-mail: [email protected]://www.gpad.ac.ru

Vietnam Physical SocietyPresident: Nguyen Ba AnAddress: PO box 607, Bo Ho, Hanoi, VietnamE-mail: [email protected]://www.iop.vast.ac.vn

edited by

Lars Brink (Chalmers University of Technology), Lay Nam Chang (Virginia Tech),

Moo-Young Han (Duke University) & Kok Khoo Phua (NTU, Singapore)

MEMORIAL VOLUME FOR

Y. NAMBU

“I have only the fondest of memories of Nambu. He was a man of inordinate kindness, and there were many times that I felt I was a beneficiary of his consideration and generosity. Of course, the impact of his science was enormous.”

H. David Politzer, Caltech Nobel Laureate in Physics, 2004

“A physicist universally admired by all who knew him as a kind and caring friend who was modest, considerate and soft-spoken. If Nambu is to be characterized in one short phrase, it is that he was a person of humble modesty and quiet dignity. But unbeknownst to many he also harbored a delightful penchant for drama on one hand and a deep sense of humor on the other.”

Moo-Young Han, Duke University 200pp Apr 2016 978-981-3108-31-8 US$48 £32978-981-3108-32-5(pbk) US$28 £18

“As everyone knows, in 1960 Yoichiro Nambu had the idea that the axial vector current of beta decay could be considered to be conserved in the same limit that the pion, the lightest hadron, could be considered massless [...] if the axial vector current was associated with a spontaneously broken approximate symmetry, with the pion playing the role of a Goldstone boson. Nambu used this idea to explain the success of the Goldberger–Treiman formula for the pion decay amplitude.”

Steven Weinberg, University of Texas at AustinNobel Laureate in Physics, 1979

SL_PS_01_16_03_CC.indd 1 18/3/16 8:41 AM

Excursions in the Land of Statistical Physicsby Michael E. Fisher (The University of Maryland, College Park, USA)

A fundamental question in the theory of matter concerns the nature of different phases, the transitions between them and the associated critical phenomena. The researches of Prof. Michael Fisher address many aspects of these basic questions ranging from establishing rigorous theorems for the underlying statistical mechanics through exact analytical and precise numerical solutions for model systems, dimensional expansions and renormalization group calculations, Monte Carlo simulations, and phenomenological and thermodynamic analysis of concrete experimental observations.

Chapter 1 Michael Fisher At King’s College London Cyril Domb

Chapter 2 The Theory of Condensation And The Critical Point Michael E. Fisher

Chapter 3 The States of Matter — A Theoretical Perspective Michael E. Fisher

Chapter 4 Walks, Walls, Wetting, And Melting Michael E. Fisher

Chapter 5 Condensed Matter Physics: Does Quantum Mechanics Matter? Michael E. Fisher

Chapter 6 Phases and Phase Diagrams: Gibbs’s Legacy Today Michael E. Fisher

Chapter 7 How to Simulate Fluid Criticality: The simplest ionic model has Ising behavior but the proof is not so obvious!

Michael E. Fisher

Chapter 8 Molecular Motors: A Theorist’s Perspective Anatoly B. Kolomeisky and Michael E. Fisher

Chapter 9 Renormalization group theory, the epsilon expansion and Ken Wilson as I knew him

Michael E. Fisher

Chapter 10 Statistical physics in the oeuvre of Chen Ning Yang Michael E. Fisher

Statistical Mechanicsand Related Areas

386pp Jul 2016978-981-3144-89-7 US$88 £56978-981-3144-90-3(pbk) US$46 £33

World Scientific Series in 21st Century Mathematics - Volume 2

Fifty Years of Mathematical Physics Selected Works of Ludwig Faddeevedited by Molin Ge (Chern Institute of Mathematics, China & Chinese Academy of Science, China), Antti J Niemi (Uppsala University, Sweden & CNRS/Tours, France)

Featuring exclusively the major scientific achievements of Ludvig Faddeev that spans over fifty years of his career:

Part 1: Scattering Theory

Part 2: Automorphic Functions

Part 3: Field Theory

Part 4: Theory of Solitons

Part 5: Quantum Groups

Part 6: Knots

Part 7: General Questions

596pp Apr 2016978-981-4340-95-3 US$168 £111978-981-3109-33-9(pbk) US$84 £55

“It is excellent.”Nobel Laureate C N Yang

"Faddeev's selected papers give ample evidence of his contributions at the forefront of physics and mathematics. The breadth, vigor and beauty of Ludwig's permanent accomplishments fully justifies calling him the 'Beethoven of mathematical physics."

Professor Roman W Jackiw(MIT)

“If universities are indeed the institutional Rosetta Stones of our time, then Feng is arguably the sector’s Jean-Francois Champollion.”

C. David NaylorPresident Emeritus, The University of Toronto

“This is a must-read book for all!”Fu-Jia Yang

Academician, Chinese Academy of SciencesFormer President, Fudan University

Former Chancellor, University of Nottingham

“Professor Feng is a rare authority in linking higher educations of North America and Asia, especially Greater China and Southeast Asia.”

Sung-Mo Steve KangPresident, KAIST

Chancellor Emeritus, University of California, Merced

“A good book will leave a good taste in one’s mind. This is such a book. Savor it!”

Shih Choon Fong Professor and Former President, National University of SingaporeFounding President, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

“I salute Professor Feng and congratulate him on the publication of this vital and incomparable book, written by a true modern Renaissance Man!”

Carter TsengFounder and CEO, Little Dragon Foundation

Member, Board of Directors, USA Committee of 100Member, Board of Trustees, USA Give2Asia Foundation

“This ‘Edu-renaissance’ book by Da Hsuan Feng is a ‘tour de force’ of the 21st century fast-changing global academic world.”

Yitzhak Apeloig President Emeritus

Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

Professor Feng Da Hsuan is the Director of the Global Affairs Office and Special Advisor to Rector at the University of Macau. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and an expert in nuclear and nuclear astrophysics, quantum optics, and mathematical physics, with a wide range of experiences and outstanding achievements as a scholar, researcher, and leader of university comprehensive development.

Professor Feng was M Russell Wehr Chair Professor of Physics at Drexel University, Director of the Division of Theoretical Phys-ics of the United States National Science Foundation, Vice Pres-ident for research and economic development at the University of Texas at Dallas, Vice President of the Fortune 500 Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and Senior Vice President of Tsing Hua University and Cheng Kung University in Taiwan.

460pp Mar 2016978-981-4632-70-6 US$55 / £36 978-981-31-4382-1(pbk) US$29 / £20

Edu-renaissance: Notes from a Globetrotting Higher Educator brings together 50 of Professor Feng Da Hsuan’s speeches, articles and reviews from the last decade and a half. They cover a wide range of ever-relevant topics such as the value of higher education in society, the role Asian universities have in the world, and hot topics like university ranking. Professor Feng also shares his new ideas and insight on promising young universities and higher education in the 21st century. This volume is ideal for readers who are part of a global community concerned about one of the most important issues in the world today — education.

by Feng Da Hsuan

SL_WN_02_16_11_v5_maha.indd 1 31/3/16 9:50 AM

[Date]

BASIC RESEARCH AND : – SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT – PEACE – CLIMATE – HEALTH – THE GLOBAL FACILITATION EDUCATION, KNOWLEDGE AND TECHNOLOGY MECHANISM – OPEN INNOVATION AND COLLABORATIVE ECONOMY – THE IMPORTANCE OF PURSUING BASIC RESEARCH IN EMERGING COUNTRIES

FUNDAMENTAL SCIENCE AND SOCIETY ICISE, QUY NHON VIETNAM 7-8 JULY 2016

ON THE OCCASION OF THE 50 T H ANNIVERSARY OF THE RENCONT RES DE MORIOND, THE MIN IST RY OF SC IE NCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF VIETNAM, THE POPULAR COMMITTEE OF THE

PROVINCE DE B INH DINH, THE RENCONTRES DU VIET NAM AND THE RENCONTRES DE MORIOND AR E CO-ORGANIZ ING WITH T HE PARTNE RSH IP OF CERN AND T HE SOLVAY INST I TUTES AND

UNDER THE HIGH PATRONAGE OF UNESCO

International Advisory Committee Laurent Beaulieu (University Paris VI), Frederik Bordry (Director of Accelerators and Technology of CERN, Geneva), Jacques Dumarchez (University Paris VI), Jean-Marie Frère (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Jerome Friedman (1990 Physics Nobel Laureate, MIT, Cambridge), Louis Fayard (CNRS, Paris), Yannick Giraud -Heraud (University Paris VII), Serge Haroche (2012 Physics Nobel Laureates, ENS, Paris), Jacques Hassinski (University Paris 11, Orsay), Rolf Heuer (President of the German Physical Society), Lydia Iconomidou-Fayard (University Paris XI), Jean Jouzel, (CEA, Saclay), Boaz Klima (Fermilab, Batavia), Pham Quang Hung (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), Bolek Pietrzyk (Université Savoie Mont Blanc, Annecy), Carlo Rubbia (1984 Physics Nobel Laureate, CERN, Geneva), Trinh Xuân Thuân (University of Virginia, Charlottesville)

Patronage Authorities Vu Duc Dam (Vice Prime Minister of Vietnam), Chu Ngoc Anh (Minister of Science and Technology of Vietnam), Nguyen Quan (Former Minister of Science and Technology of Vietnam), Nguyen Thanh Tung (General Secretary of the Province of Binh Dinh), Ho Quoc Dung (President of the Popular Committee of the Province of Binh Dinh)

International Scientific Committee Jean Audouze (Former Scientific Advisor of President Mitterrand), Phan Thanh Binh (President, Ho Chi Minh City University), Lars Brink (Former Chair of Nobel Committee for Physics, Göteborg), Hescheng Chen (Institute of High Energy Physics, Beijing), Pascal Colombani (Chairman of the Board of Directors of Valeo, Paris), Michel Davier (Academy of Sciences, Paris), Jerome Friedman (1990 Physics Nobel Laureate, MIT, Cambridge), Fabiola Gianotti (General Director, CERN, Geneva), David Gross (2004 Physics Nobel Laureate, Former Director of the KITP, Santa Barbara), Nguyen van Hieu (Former Director of National Center of Scientific Research, Hanoi), Nguyen Duc Khuong (IPAG Business School, Paris), Pierre Léna (Academy of Sciences, Paris), Soo-Jong Rey (Seoul National University, Seoul), Dam Thanh Son (University of Chicago, Academy of Sciences, USA), Neil Turok (Director of Perimeter Institute, Waterloo), Kurt Wüthrich (2002 Chemistry Nobel Laureate, ETH and La Jolla)

Advisor to the Steering Committee Marc Henneaux (Director, Institutes Solvay, Brussels)

Steering Committee Etienne Augé (Vice President, Université Paris XI, Orsay), Maurizio Bona (Advisor to the General Director, CERN, Geneva), Michel Spiro (President, French Physical Society, Paris), Jean Tran Thanh Van (President, Rencontres du Vietnam, Gif sur Yvette)

Local Organizing Committee Patrick Boiron (President of University of Science and Technology of Hanoi), Tran Chau (Vice President of the Popular Committee of Binh Dinh province), Huynh Thanh Dat (Vice President of National University of Ho Chi Minh Ville), Nguyen Thi Thanh Ha (Vice Director of Social and Natural Science, Ministry of Science and Technology), Tran Thi Thu Ha (Former Vice President of the Popular Committee of Binh Dinh province), Doan Minh Hoa (ICISE, Quy Nhon), Nguyen Viet Hung (Chief of Staff of Vice Prime Minister), Phan Bao Ngoc (National University of Ho Chi Minh Ville), Le Cong Nhuong (Director of Science and Technology Department, Binh Dinh, Quy Nhon), Tran Thanh Son (ICISE, Quy Nhon) , Nguyen Tan (Director of International Relation Department, Binh Dinh, Quy Nhon), Le Van Tang (Former Director at the Ministry of Planning and Investment), Le Quang Thanh (Director of Social and Natural Science, Ministry of Science and Technology, Tu Diep Cong Thanh (National University of Ho Chi Minh Ville), Bui Thanh Thao, National University of Ho Chi Minh Ville), Tran Thanh Van (ICISE, Quy Nhon)

http://rencontresduvietnam.org/conferences/2016/fundamental-science-and-society/

Conference Secretariat Aimie Fong, Nguyen Thi Loi, Sarodia Vydelingum, Do Nghieng Thao

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