Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) Releases New Results on Dark Matter Detection

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.

17th Annual Conference of the Physical Society of Hong Kong

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.

Hong Kong Scientists and Students Joined ATLAS Team at LHC, CERN

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.

Temple University Physics Professor Xiaoxing Xi and The Dismissal of Wire Fraud Charges

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/ ].

Prof. François Englert

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."

"Conference on 60 Years of Yang-Mills Gauge Field Theories"

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.

Nonlinear Physics Down Under

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.

My Life with Quarks

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.

Haiyan Gao Appointed as Duke Kunshan University's Vice Chancellor

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.

IAS Hosts the 8th Joint Meeting of Chinese Physicists Worldwide

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.