Following the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017, we are pleased to announce that the 2017 Paul and May Chu Undergraduate Research Award will be awarded to Pok Man TAM, and the Honorable Mentions will be awarded to I-Hsuan KAO and Aditya Varna IYER. The Paul and May Chu UG Research Award is the highest honor offered by the Department of Physics to recognize outstanding research in physics by an undergraduate student.
Pok Man TAM has worked on both experimental and theoretical condensed matter physics. In his experimental research that he carried out under the supervision of Prof. Rolf LORTZ at HKUST, he studied the iron-based superconductors BaKFeAs and coauthored two papers [Physical Review B 93, 104516 (2016); Physica C 539, 30 (2017)]. At MIT, he predicted the massive and tilted Dirac Landau levels on the surface of topological crystalline insulators under the supervision of Prof. Inti SODEMANN of the Max Planck Institute and Prof. Liang FU.
I-Hsuan KAO has worked on iron based superconductors since spring 2017, under the supervision of Prof. Rolf LORTZ. In this project he developed a new method to study the nodeless superconductivity in underdoped Iron-based superconductors FeSe1-xSx by measuring the temperature dependence of the lower critical field. He coauthored one paper [Physica C 539, 30 (2017)] and he is currently preparing another as first author.
Aditya Varna IYER had worked on cosmology and astrophysics from May to June 2017, under the supervision of Prof. Robert BRANDENBERGER at McGill University. In this project, he found the possibility that Fast Radio Bursts occur due to the annihilation of cusps on cosmic string loops. The results are summarized in a preprint on arXiv:1707.02397.
For the details of the award, please check the HKUST Physics UG Scholarship website.
Congratulations to Pok Man TAM, I-Hsuan KAO, and Aditya Varna IYER!
Sincerely yours,
Prof. Michael Altman
Head, Department of Physics
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Prof. Shengwang Du
Chair, UG Scholarship Task Group
Department of Physics
