Volume 4, Number 4, 2009

WHAT WE FOCUS ON …

The Sixth Joint Meeting of Chinese Physicists Worldwide (OCPA6) was convened in Lanzhou in August 2009. Three professors were awarded the Achievement in Asia Award (AAA) (Robert T. Poe Prize) of the Overseas Chinese Physics Association (OCPA): Prof. Hong-jun GAO (Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences) was the winner of the 2008 AAA award; the EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) plasma research team at the Institute of Plasma Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. Jie MENG (School of Physics, Peking University, China) are the co-winners of the 2009 AAA award.

The OCPA AAA Award is given annually to Asia-based Chinese physicists for their outstanding achievements in physics.

Prof. Hong-jun GAO(高鸿钧）received his Ph.D. degree in 1994 at Peking University with Prof. Quan-de WU. He worked as an associate professor for one year at Beijing Laboratory of Vacuum Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), after which he was promoted to professor and served as the deputy-director of the Laboratory. Since 2001, he has been the director of Nanoscale Physics and Device Laboratory, Institute of Physics, CAS.

Prof. Gao’s research area is in nanosciences. His work on the conductance transition at the molecular scale and his achievement in high-resolution scanning tunneling microscope were particularly notable. One of the important works he conducted in China was to study the conductance transition at a single molecular scale and its application in nano recording and ultrahigh data density storage. He was the first person to demonstrate that information can be rewritten and erased in a film at or near a single molecule scale (about 1 nm). He and his collaborators have kept the leadership on the topic in the world from 1996 to date. He also made great contributions to the improvements of our understanding on the self-assembly of functional nanostructures on metal and semiconductor surfaces, and the transport property of nanostructures, which are crucial for application in nanodevices. In addition, his work on self-assembled growth of a unique fractal “seahorse” pattern, which shows symmetry breaking, is of great interest and was chosen as a cover of the Fractal journal.

Prof. Jian-gang LI (李建刚,Director of IPP) is the leader of the EAST team. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1990 at IPP, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). After a postdoctoral experience at Oxford, UK, he became the head of HT-6M Tokamak, physics division, ASIPP, as an associate professor. Four years later, he became professor and served as the head of physics division, ASIPP. Since 2001, he has served as the director of ASIPP.

The EAST team, under the leadership of Prof. Jian-gang LI, made great contribution to plasma physics by building a fully superconducting Tokamak device capable of exploring the important physics regime of steady-state operation in a way that surpasses all previous works on this subject. In completing this project in a remarkably short time, Prof. Li and his team have managed also to position EAST to make timely contributions to the world fusion effort by producing data that can be invaluable to the much larger international Thermonuclear Fusion Reactor (ITER) project, which is just now underway. It is an outstanding achievement that has at once put China in a central and leading position in solving the world’s energy problems through nuclear fusion.

Prof. Jie MENG(孟杰）received his Ph.D. degree in 1991 at Peking University, and spent three years on postdoctoral research at Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Institute for Nuclear and Hadron Physics, Research Center Rossendor f , Germany. Then, he became an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at Technical University Munich, Germany. Two years later, he joined the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) in Japan as an STA (Science and Technology Agency) research fellow. Since 1997, he has been with the School of Physics at Peking University as a professor of physics.

Prof. Meng’s research is focused on nuclear structure theory. He has pioneered in the microscopic description of halo phenomena as well as other new phenomena including giant halos, magnetic rotation and chirality in atomic nuclei. In particular, chirality in atomic nuclei was later confirmed by experiment and has become a hot topic in the forefront of nuclear physics. His predication of giant halos in heavy nuclei near the neutron drip-line has served as the motivation for experiments at leading accelerator facilities worldwide. His effor ts in nuclear physics research, education and service have been recognized by several awards over the years, including the Khwarizmi International Award by the Iranian government, the WU You-xun Prize by the Chinese Physics Society, and the First Rank Natural Science Prize by Ministry of Education in China.