About HKU-UCAS Joint Institute of Theoretical and Computational Physics

The Department of Physics houses the "HKU-UCAS Joint Institute of Theoretical and Computational Physics", which was established in September, 2005. The purpose of the Centre is to enhance academic excellence in this area in Hong Kong and to serve as a platform for fostering collaboration between scientists in Hong Kong and abroad. The centre's honorary Director is Prof. Dan Tsui at Princeton University, Nobel Prize co-recipient in Physics in 1998. The Centre has a high level Advisory Committee, whose members include William Goddard at Cal Tech. (Member of the US NAS), Hong Guo at McGill Univ. (Fellow of Royal Society Canada), Patrick Lee at MIT (Member of the US NAS), Sir Anthony J. Leggett at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Nobel Prize co-recipient in Physics, 2003), Steve Louis at Berkeley (Member of the US NAS), T. M. Rice at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Fellow of Royal Society London and member of the US NAS), Matthias Troyer at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Dan Tsui, Frank Wilczek (Member of the US NAS, Nobel Prize co-recipient in Physics in 2004), F.C. Zhang at Zhejiang University (Founding Director). The team of the Centre includes 12 faculty staff members (H.F. Chau, G. Chen, K.S. Cheng, Z.Y. Meng, S.C.Y. Ng, S.Q. Shen, Y.J. Tu, C.J. Wang, J. Wang (Director), Z.D. Wang, W. Yao, and S.Z. Zhang) in the Department of Physics, one (G.H. Chen) in the Department of Chemistry, one (M.H. Lee) in the Department of Earth Sciences and one (G. Chiribella) in the Department of Computer Science. These members have been working in condensed matter physics, computational material sciences, quantum information, cold-atom physics and astrophysics. Most of these subfields are related to each other and cover many cutting edge researches related to today's science and tomorrow's technology.

The functions of the Centre include

(1) To invite scientists including distinguished scientists who have collaborated with or are potential collaborators of local scientists to Hong Kong to initiate or to carry out collaborative researches;

(2) To organize lectures or public lectures given by distinguished visitors;

(3) To train outstanding postdoctoral fellows and young talented graduate students to collaborate with Centre's visitors and the team members to carry out first class researches;

(4) To coordinate with similar centres or institutes in Pacific Rim region and in the world to regularly organize high level international conferences and/or workshops to establish itself as the magnet of research activities in these research areas in the region.

In the year of 2019/2020, the center will hold two activities related to the computational and theoretical physics: