Asia Pacific Physics Newsletter

The Belgian theoretical particle physicists François Baron Englert is the 2013 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics and is currently Professor emeritus at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. He is also affiliated with the School of Physics and Astronomy of Tel Aviv University, Israel and the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University, USA. Prof. Englert was awarded many notable awards, such as the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics in 2010, the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2004 and the High Energy and Particle Prize of the European Physical Society in 1997. Peter W. Higgs and he were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 for "the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles."

For an hour on 27 May 2015, six C.N. Yang scholars from Nanyang Technological University had the privilege of conducting an informal discussion with Prof. Yang. Coming from different faculties and subject groups, the students represented the spectrum of subject areas that were influenced by Prof Yang's work. Centring on the topics of inspiration and research, Prof. Yang, accompanied by Prof. Choo Hiap Oh (Professor, Department of Physics, National University of Singapore) and Prof. Kok Khoo Phua (Director, Institute of Advanced Studies, Nanyang Technological University), dispensed advice with some humour.

Professor Emmanuel Tsesmelis: is an experimental particle physicist with a career spanning scientific research, academic teaching, science communication, international relations and management at CERN and at several universities. He is a Senior Physicist and Deputy Head of International Relations in CERN's Director-General Unit and a Visiting Professor in Particle and Accelerator Physics at the University of Oxford. He is an elected Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics and a supernumerary member of Jesus College, Oxford.

Professor Albert De Roeck: is a senior research scientist and staff member at CERN. He is also a professor at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and a visiting professor at the Institute of Particle Physics and Phenomenology in Durham (UK). He obtained his PhD at the university of Antwerp on an experiment at CERN, studying the multiparticle dynamics in hadron-hadron interactions, by colliding meson beams on protons and nuclear targets. After his PhD, Albert spent 10 years at the German particle physics laboratory, DESY, where he and his team made very precise measurements of the quark and gluon structure of the proton. In the late 90's his interest turned to the possibility to discover new physics, in particular Supersymmetry and Extra Dimensions, and he returned to CERN and joined an experiment at the large electron-positron collider LEP. Albert is now one the leaders of the physics program and preparation for physics analysis at the CMS experiment at the LHC.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) was established in 1922 in Brussels with 13 member countries. Its aim is to support and promote Physics and Physics learning worldwide. The Union is governed by its General Assembly which meets every three years. The Council is its top executive body, supervising the activities of the 19 specialized International Commissions and 4 Affiliated Commissions.

In 1954 Prof. Chen Ning Yang spent some time at Brookhaven National Laboratories where he met Robert Mills. They decided to study an extension of Quantum Electro Dynamics, where the local symmetry, the gauge symmetry, was a non-abelian symmetry algebra, SU(2), with three vector bosons mediating the forces between a doublet of matter particles. The symmetry that the authors had in mind was the isotopic symmetry and hence this was a prototype model for the strong interactions between protons and neutrons. The mass of the vector bosons was zero classically and the authors speculated that that they might obtain masses during quantization. On 1 October 1954 the Yang-Mills paper was published in the Physical Review. It was criticized directly by Wolfgang Pauli and others who argued that the vector particles would be massless leading to long-range interactions that was in contradiction to the experimental facts about the strong interactions. The interest in the paper was not so strong in the beginning.

In the early morning of May 21 2015, FBI agents burst into the home of Prof. Xiaoxing Xi and his family and arrested Prof. Xi. The agents brandishing weapons, forcibly dragged Prof. Xi away in handcuffs. With a search warrant, the agents searched their home and seized belongings [http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/09/18/xiaoxing-xi-china-spyfbi-state-visit-column/32560009/].

Alibaba Group's cloud computing subsidiary, Aliyun, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) signed a memorandum of understanding on 31 July 2015 in Shanghai to co-found the Chinese Academy of Sciences – Alibaba Quantum Computing Laboratory. The aim of the new research facility is to advance the study and applications of quantum theory, thereby creating new technologies and platforms for information security, connectivity and computing.

It is known that the majority (about 80%) of the matter in the universe is not visible, but rather a hypothetical "Dark Matter". The existence of Dark Matter has been postulated to explain the discrepancies between the estimated mass of visible matters in the galaxies, and their gravitational effects. Although it has been postulated for over 70 years, and has been commonly accepted by most scientists, the essence of the Dark Matter has not yet been understood. In particular, we still do not know what constitutes the Dark Matter. Direct detection of the Dark Matter is therefore one of the most important issues in physics.

Results of the analyses by individual experiments (coloured) and both experiments together (black), showing the improvement in precision resulting from the combination of results.

On 26 February 2015, a report from Chinese government website showed that Peking University just welcomed a new president, marking its third change of heads in less than seven years. Professor Lin Jianhua (林建华), 59, replaced Professor Wang Enge (王恩哥) as the 27th president of the university where he started study chemistry in 1978 and obtained his doctorate in inorganic chemistry.

Haiyan Gao, the Henry Newson professor of physics at the Duke University, has recently been appointed as the vice chancellor for academic affairs at the Duke Kunshan University. She was the chair of the department of physics at Duke University from 2011 to 2014, and former president of the International Organization of the Chinese Physicists and Astronomers.

The 11th Asia-Pacific Conference on Materials Processing (APCMP) was successfully held from the 6th to 9th July 2014, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The aim of this conference was to provide an opportunity for researchers and industrial practitioners from around the world to interchange information on the latest development and applications in materials science and technologies. This is an important international conference hosted by the University of Auckland, which also recognised the contributions of materials research by the University of Auckland.

This summer, the International Organization of Chinese Physicists and Astronomers (OCPA), held their 8th Joint Meeting of Chinese Physicists Worldwide (OCPA8) at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Participants included Nobel Laureates Prof Chen-Ning Yang (Nobel Laureate in Physics 1957) and Prof Carlo Rubbia (Nobel Laureate in Physics 1984), as well as distinguished speakers from leading institutions in Asia, Australia, Europe, and the United States. The theme of the conference was Physics Education and Frontier Physics.

Many events have happened in 2014. In this newsletter I am pleased to report that the OCPA8 Conference held in Singapore this June has been successfully concluded, with some of the highlights summarized below. I am also happy to announce the site and hosting organizations of the OCPA9 Conference, the 2014 OCPA Award winners, and various honors and recognitions recently received by the OCPA members.

On June 7th 2014 (Saturday), the 17th Annual Conference of the Physical Society of Hong Kong (PSHK), was hosted by the Department of Physics of Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). It was jointly organized by the Departments of Physics of six local universities (HKBU, CityU, CUHK, PolyU, HKUST, HKU), and was successfully held in the Tsang Chan Sik Yue Auditorium (and other second floor classrooms) of the Academic & Administration Building. The five themes of this conference are: (1) Metamaterials for Wave Manipulation; (2) Energy Materials and Devices; (3) Condensed Matter Physics; (4) Theoretical Physics and Astronomy; (5) Interdisciplinary Topics. Three internationally prestigious researchers, Prof. Ching W. Tang, Prof. Ping Sheng, and Prof. Henry Tye, were invited to give plenary talks, which were quite inspiring. Together with seventeen invited talks, forty contributed talks, and thirty-three posters, the Saturday event has attracted a total of more than one hundred participants consisting of local and overseas scholars and students. At the end of this conference, four Best Student Poster Awards were given to Chang Shuai (CUHK), Zhenghui Wu (HKBU), Shen Chan (HKUST), and Jiajun Zhang (CUHK). This important annual conference of PSHK will again be hosted by the Department of Physics at PolyU in the year 2015.

A team of physicists from Hong Kong has formally joined the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN since June, 2014. In 2012, the ATLAS Collaboration – along with the CMS Collaboration – co-discovered the Higgs boson. The discovery of the Higgs boson is widely regarded as a major step towards understanding the fundamental structure of matter and other mysteries of our universe. The admission of the Hong Kong team into ATLAS means, all these exciting opportunities of unveiling an era of new breakthroughs in fundamental physics, are now opened up to scientists and students from Hong Kong. The Hong Kong team plans to take up both hardware and software tasks on the muon detecting system and analysis of data to look for new physics.

The Asian Physics Olympiad (APhO), initiated in the year of 2000 by Indonesia, is an annual international physics competition devoted to students of secondary schools in the Asia region. It is usually held in late April or early May in which more than twenty countries and regions have participated in the competition since its beginning. Its conduction exactly follows that of International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) except each participating country is allowed to send eight contestants at the most instead of five as in IPhO.

PhysicsOverflow is a high-level physics site intended to facilitate real-time discussion between academics and professional researchers in physics. It contains a graduate-level Q&A forum and an open peer review system for discussing and reviewing pre-prints. The Q&A forum is a physics counterpart of MathOverflow, accepting graduate-level physics questions, while the Reviews section is an open peer review system that intends to complement peer reviewing in conventional journals. There is also an "Open Problems" section to allow researchers to communicate and collaborate on their research problems, and a "Chat" section for more informal discussions relating to physics. Content may be commented and voted on to discuss the accuracy of posts. Moderation and policy discussions are done by the community, which can, through voting, decide on issues like closing questions and deleting posts. The site generally receives about 50,000 page views a month, and has received the attention of professional physicists, including string theorists, condensed matter theorists, experimentalists and mathematical physicists from around the globe.

Quantum entanglement underpins the realization of quantum simulators and computers, which can be used for unbreakable cryptography and powerful computational algorithms. Entangled photons are an ideal medium for creating and manipulating quantum states due to the low noise and ease of transmission. A qubit encoded into a photon can be easily sent between different photonic elements along an optical fiber, in analogy with the transmission of classical bits along electrical wires. Furthermore, logic operations can be performed on entangled photons by exploiting the nonlinearity inherent to quantum measurements [1]. The practical implementation of complex applications requires the minimization of coupling losses, as well as stable quantum interference. Low losses and interferometric stability allow strong entanglement between output photons. One of the biggest milestones in achieving these requirements is the integration of photon sources together with optical circuits on the same photonic chip.

Control of light at the nanoscale is demanding for future successful on-chip integration. At the subwavelength scale, the conventional optical elements such as lenses become not functional, and they require conceptually new approach for a design of nanoscale photonic devices. The most common approach to the subwavelength photonics is based on plasmonic nanoparticles and plasmonic waveguides due to their ability to capture and concentrate visible light at subwavelength dimensions. But the main drawback of all plasmonic devices is their intrinsic losses due to metallic components which affect strongly the overall performance of plasmonic structures limiting their scalability and practical use.

Nonlinear Physics Center was established in 2002, as a small group working on various problems of nonlinear dynamics and solitons. Then it became a separate department of the Research School of Physics and Engineering which was continuously expanding with the support from the Australian Research Council (ARC) through a variety of different funding schemes — individual fellowships and the ARC Center of Excellence program. In August 2014, the Center's research was conducted by 17 researchers and 19 PhD students (see Fig 1). Currently, the Nonlinear Physics Center is engaged in theoretical and experimental research in several areas unified by the general concepts of nonlinear physics and photonics. The Center is composed of several major research groups with not sharply defined boundaries.

In 2004 Ohtomo and Hwang discovered the conducting interface between the two insulating non-magnetic oxide crystals LaAlO₃ and SrTiO₃. Since its discovery this interface has been under intense research both on the theoretical and on the experimental fronts. The carrier density of the interface was found to be gate tunable. This carrier density controls the superconducting temperature in a non-monotonic fashion. Surprisingly, along with the superconductivity, various probes discovered the presence of magnetism these two orders are considered to be mutually excluded. None of the reported experiments has yet been able to determine the full nature of the magnetic ground state of the interface.

Quantum teleportation is one of the most enigmatic protocols realized so far in the area of quantum information, allowing for the transfer of quantum information assisted by an entangled state. It was a subject of science fiction 20 years ago, but now is a fundamental experimental protocol and quantum primitive for quantum information processing tasks. There have been many successful realizations of teleportation ranging from those using photons, atoms, and hybrid systems and long-range teleportation beyond 100km has already been achieved multiple times. These however typically involve explicitly single particle systems or effective few-particle systems. For larger (visible to the naked eye) objects involving many particles, teleportation is typically more difficult due to the fast decoherence such macroscopic objects suffer. In this case, the entanglement disappears almost as soon as it is created, making it useless for such tasks. More recently, teleportation was accomplished in the continuous variables (CV) framework between two atomic ensembles [1]. As remarkable as these achievements are, teleportation schemes that are known today (qubit/CV) do not allow us to teleport more complex quantum states at the macroscopic level. For example, while it is possible in principle to extend teleportation to multiple qubits, on a macroscopic level this is prohibitively complicated and highly susceptible to decoherence. For atomic ensemble CV based schemes, the teleported states are restricted to small displacements from the completely S^x-polarized state on the Bloch sphere.

In this article, I will talk about the impact Kenneth Geddes Wilson (1936-2013) had on my career.

This is a personal, anecdotal and autobiographical account of my early endeavors in particle physics, emphasizing how they interwove with the conception and eventual acceptance of the quark hypothesis. I focus on the years from 1958, when my doctoral work at Harvard was completed, to 1970, when John Iliopoulos, Luciano Maiani and I introduced the GIM mechanism, thereby extending the electroweak model to include all known particles, and some that were not then known. I have not described the profound advances in quantum field theory and the many difficult and ingenious experimental efforts that undergird my story which is not intended to be an inclusive record of this exciting decade of my discipline. My tale begins almost two years before I met Murray and over five years before the invention of quarks.

President Hill, Professor Feroe, the Board of Trustees, the eminent faculty, proud parents, grandparents and Vassar graduates of the class of 2014: Thank you for giving me this great honor and wonderful opportunity to address today's 150th commencement ceremony.