HKIQST Celebrates Prof. Yang Yi’s Inclusion in the 2024 Alibaba DAMO Academy Young Fellow List

On December 20, 2024, the results of the 2024 list of (Alibaba) DAMO Academy Young Fellow were announced, with 15 young Chinese scientists winning the award. Their average age is 34 years old, and they have made significant achievements in various key areas such as integrated optoelectronic chips, affective computing and interaction, the cryosphere of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and temporal sky surveys. Among them, over 60% of the awardees have introduced artificial intelligence into their research fields, achieved breakthroughs through interdisciplinary studies, and demonstrated that young Chinese scientists are at the forefront, actively exploring a new paradigm of “AI for Science.”
HKIQST extends our hearty congratulations to our fellow, Prof. Yang Yi. He has made significant strides in clarifying the coupling limit problem between photons and free electrons and has taken a crucial step in enhancing and controlling their interaction. His outstanding work has earned him a prestigious position as one of the Young Fellows at the Alibaba DAMO Academy.

APS March Meeting Hong Kong 2025 | 16-21 March

The Physical Society of Hong Kong and the American Physical Society have agreed to hold a satellite conference in Hong Kong during the APS March Meeting from March 16 to 21, 2025. Some academic presentations made at the Hong Kong venue can be simultaneously broadcasted to the online platform of the APS March Meeting, and attendees can also view presentations from the APS online platform. Under the circumstances where some researchers are unable to attend the meeting in the United States due to visa issues, our conference will provide a valuable platform for them to showcase their research achievements and engage in academic exchanges with international collaborators.
For Registration and Details : https://www.qebulamind.com/aps-conference

HKIQST Celebrates the Appointment of Professor Yi Yang as Belinda Hung Outstanding Young Professor

We are thrilled about the appointment of Professor Yi Yang as the Belinda Hung Outstanding Young Professor.
Outstanding Young Professorships were featured for the first time at the Thirteenth Inauguration of Endowed Professorships held by The University of Hong Kong (HKU) on 25 November 2024, celebrating six new Endowed Professorships and two new Outstanding Young Professorships. Professor Yi Yang, the HKIQST fellow was gifted the Belinda Hung Outstanding Young Professorship.
Professor Yang’s contributions have been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, including the 2024 Xplorer Prize and the 2024 Croucher Tak Wah Mak Innovation Award for Pioneering Photonics Research. His accolades also include being named a Physical Science Fellow in the 2023 Asian Young Scientist Fellowship, being recognized as one of the Innovators under 35 (China) by MIT Technology Review in 2022 and receiving the 2022 Excellent Young Scientists Fund (Hong Kong and Macau) from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, an organization managed by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST).
Please click here for the list of Professorships.

HKIQST Colloquium: “Quantum Simulation based on Atoms and Ions” by Prof. PU Han on Friday, November 29, 2024, 2:30 pm LG1 – CYCP1, Chong Yuet Ming Physics Building, HKU

Quantum simulation is one of the pillars of Quantum Revolution 2.0. Its essence is to simulate a complicated and hard-to-control quantum system using a simple and controllable one. Ultracold atoms and ions, due to their unprecedented controllability, have become an important platform for quantum simulation. In this talk, I will introduce two recent works in collaboration with my experimental colleagues at Rice. The first work concerns the simulation of electron transfer — an important issue relevant to many biochemical processes and material science — using trapped ions; and the second concerns the simulation of spin-charge separation — a unique phenomenon in one dimensional quantum many-body system — using two-component ultracold Fermi gas. These two works clearly demonstrated the advantages of performing quantum simulation using cold atoms and ions. I will also discuss some future directions based on these works.

HKIQST fellow Professor Qi Zhao Named Among MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35

MIT Technology Review, a magazine founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, annually selects 35 Innovators Under 35 by region.
HKIQST is proud to announce that our fellow, Professor Qi Zhao, Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Data Science, the University of Hong Kong has been recognized as one of the 35 Innovators Under 35 for the Asia-Pacific region by MIT Technology Review. This prestigious award highlights young innovators whose work promises to change the world.

CTCP Seminar: “Anomaly pattern of point groups and high-order topological states” by Prof Yang QI on Wednesday, October 30, 2024, 4:00pm KKLG101, LG1/F, K.K. Leung Building, HKU

An essential feature of topological crystalline states (TCSs), which are short-range-entanged topological states protected by crystalline symmetries, is they generally have high-order gapless boundary states, such as one-dimensional hinge states and zero-dimensional corner states on a two-dimensional surface. Therefore, such TCSs are also called high-order topological states. In this work, we design a systematic method to compute possible high-order boundary states of a TCS for all possible surface geometries. We show that the location of surface gapless region, dubbed the anomaly pattern, can be symmetrically and continuously deformed without changing the topologically-protected gapless states, and such deformation defines a homotopy equivalence between anomaly patterns. The list of equivalent classes of anomaly patterns are completely determined by the point-group symmetry, and it is universal for all types of TCSs, including bosonic, free-fermion and interacting-fermion states. We also describe how to compute the anomaly pattern of a bulk topological state, for all types of TCSs.

HKU Centennial Distinguished Chinese Scholars Public Lecture “Century of Superconductors” by Professor Donglai FENG on Wednesday, December 11, 2024 3:30-4:30 pm RHT, HKU

RSVP: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=97142

100+ years after its discovery in 1911, superconductivity remains one of the most fascinating and challenging topics in physics. In this talk, the history of superconductor, its physics and applications as well as the recent progress made by Chinese will be reviewed. Several inspiring anecdotes of scientists working in this field will also be highlighted.

Joint Colloquium “Neutron Scattering Studies of Protein Dynamics and its Associated Quantum Effects” by Prof Xiang-qiang CHU Wednesday, 13 Nov, 2024, 5-6pm MWT4, HKU

The roles of quantum effects in biological systems have long fascinated biophysicists. Meanwhile, proteins
undergo sophisticated motions in space and time, which are believed to ultimately govern the biological function
and activities of the proteins. Quasi-elastic neutron scattering (QENS) provides exceptional tools for studying the
dynamics of proteins in the time range of picosecond to nanosecond at the molecular level. In this talk, based
on our recent work on various biological systems studied by QENS and other techniques, such as inelastic
neutron scattering (INS), small angle neutron scattering (SANS), and neutron spin echo (NSE), I will discuss the
possibility of using neutron scattering techniques to reveal the quantum mechanical effects, such as tunneling
effect in the dynamics of proteins and connect them with protein activities or functions.

Joint Seminar “Neutron Spectroscopy Studies on Kitaev Quantum Magnets” by Prof Jinsheng Wen Monday, 9 Dec 2024 11am MW103, HKU

The Kitaev model is an exactly solvable quantum-spin-liquid model defined on a honeycomb lattice with S = 1/2. The key element underlying this model is the bond-anisotropic Kitaev interaction. However, in a spin-only system, it is unrealistic to have such anisotropic interactions. In this talk, I will show that the Kitaev interaction can be realized in a Mott insulator α-RuCl3, which has an effective spin of 1/2 by entangling the spin and orbital degrees of freedom. I will also show that by applying an in-plane magnetic field, the zigzag magnetic order ground state in α-RuCl3 can be completely suppressed, and a quantum-spin-liquid state can be induced. More recently, we extend the Kitaev physics to higher-spin system, where we find in a honeycomb-lattice antiferromagnet Na3Ni2BiO6 that there is a profound 1/3 magnetization plateau, which is stabilized by the Kitaev interaction, as evidenced from the neutron spectroscopy. This will also be discussed in the presentation.

HKIQST Colloquium: “More is different: the beauty of multiband in iron-based superconductors” by Prof. DING Hong on Friday, December 13, 2024, 10:30 am LG1 – CYPP3, Chong Yuet Ming Physics Building, HKU

During this colloquium, the unnoticed beauty of multiband of iron-based superconductors will be highlighted, including i) emerge of topological band which coexists with superconductivity, leading to the discovery of Majorana zero mode; ii) Interplay of multicomponent superconductivity, leading to the discovery of exotic paring with time-reversal symmetry breaking and fractional vortex; iii) Contribution of Hund coupling towards pairing in this unique class of superconductors.