Asia Pacific Physics Newsletter

This issue of Asia Pacific Physics Newsletter includes an exclusive interactive session with Professor Shoucheng Zhang, who is the JG Jackson and CJ Wood Professor at Stanford University and Tsinghua University. Professor Zhang was just elected as the foreign fellow of Chinese Academy of Science in December 2013. He is internationally recognized for his research in topological insulators, quantum spin Hall Effect, spintronics and high temperature superconductivity. He shared his personal experience and his research interest of topological insulator in his interactive session with C. N. Yang's scholars at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on 26 August 2013.

Prof Shoucheng Zhang, a well-renowned Chinese-American physicist, is the JG Jackson and CJ Wood Professor at Stanford University. He is internationally recognised for his research in topological insulators, quantum spin Hall effect, spintronics and high temperature superconductivity. His notable awards include the top three prizes of international physics field, namely the prestigious Dirac Medal and Prize in 2012, the Oliver Buckley prize in 2012 and the Europhysics prize in 2010.

Professor Anthony James Leggett is a distinguished physicist who was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics for his pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids. He obtained both a degree in Literae Humaniores and a degree in Physics at the University of Oxford. Professor Leggett took up a lectureship at the University of Sussex in the autumn of 1967 and moved to the University of Illinois in 1982. In 2007, he also accepted a visiting position at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

In an episode of the popular science fiction series Star Trek: The Next Generation, the crew of the USS Enterprise-D happened upon a full Dyson sphere when its gravitational fluctuations brought them to a stop. After some analysis of the sphere, Lieutenant Commander Data informed that the inside surface area of the sphere was equal to "250 million class-M worlds".

The Moon could be a "beautiful" source of minerals and energy, a top Chinese scientist has told the BBC. Exotic materials including helium-3 and the potential for solar power could prove invaluable for humankind, he says. The comments come from Prof Ouyang Ziyuan of the department of lunar and deep space exploration. His first interview with the foreign media provides insights into China's usually secretive space programme.

The first robot rover to land on the Moon in nearly 40 years, China's Jade Rabbit, has begun sending back photos, with shots of its lunar lander. Jade Rabbit rolled down a ramp lowered by the lander and on to the volcanic plain known as Sinus Iridum at 04:35 Beijing time on Saturday (20:35 GMT). It moved to a spot a few metres away, its historic short journey recorded by the lander. On Sunday evening the two machines began photographing each other. A Chinese flag is clearly visible on the Jade Rabbit as it stands deployed on the Moon's surface.

New film Gravity promises to rekindle the debate over how "hard" — or accurate-science fiction should be. Should film-makers adhere to basic scientific principles, or should audiences just feel the magic instead, asks Peter Ray Allison.

The laws of quantum mechanics enable optical communications with the ultimate capacity and quantum computers to solve certain problems with unprecedented speed. A key ingredient in such quantum information processing is quantum teleportation: the act of transferring quantum information from a sender to a spatially distant receiver by utilizing shared entanglement and classical communications. For example, optical quantum teleportation is essential for various quantum communication protocols. Quantum logic gates based on optical quantum teleportation are one of the building blocks of optical quantum computers.

The main guiding principles I have used are the following. First, it is much more important that the English written by Japanese authors be clear and easily readable than that it be elegant. Therefore, in a situation where there is a choice between an elegant form of expression which, however, may easily lead to confusion if misused and a less elegant but practically "foolproof" one, I have never hesitated to recommend the latter. Secondly, the importance of avoiding a mistake is roughly proportional to the amount of misunderstanding it may entail and/or the amount of psychological "wear and tear" it may cause on the reader's nerves. Accordingly, I have spent a good deal of space on "macroscopic" points like sentence construction, and proportionately less on "microscopic" ones like the correct use of "a" and "the"; prepositions, which most Japanese writers seem to consider a major point of difficulty in writing English, I have scarcely mentioned, not only because this is the sort of point for which one can easily refer to dictionaries but because I believe the reader can usually correct any mistakes for himself with very little mental effort. Thirdly, the usefulness of a set of notes such as this is much reduced if the rules given become too complicated. Therefore, rather than give a complicated set of rules which would ensure correctness 100% of the time, I have often preferred to give a simple rule which will be right 95% of the time, provided that in the other 5% of cases, it is unlikely to lead to confusion. I do not claim that anyone who tries to follow the advice given here will write beautiful or even invariably correct English; but I hope that what he writes will be clear and readable and that any mistakes he does make will be minor ones.

From its inception in statistical physics to its role in the construction and in the development of the asymmetric Yang–Mills phase in quantum field theory, the notion of spontaneous broken symmetry permeates contemporary physics. This is reviewed with particular emphasis on the conceptual issues.