The 7th joint meeting of the Overseas Chinese Physics Association

For the nearly 700 attendees, the 2011 Overseas Chinese Physics Association Meeting (OCPA7) was a success. The event was co-organized by OCPA, National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU), and National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) and was partly sponsored by the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center (NSRRC), Academia Sinica, and the National Science Council of Taiwan.

The conference, which took place 1–5 August on the beachfront campus of NSYSU in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, featured 11 plenary talks and 8 parallel sessions. In addition, 168 posters were exhibited in the conference hall. In their opening remarks, OCPA president (2011–12) Haiyan Gao of Duke University and cochairs Chien-Peng Yuan of Michigan State University, Li-Jun Chen of NTHU, and Hung-Duen Yang of NSYSU spoke of their visions and thanked all the supporting members for coordinating and putting together the conference programs.

OCPA was established in 1990 to bring together ethnic Chinese physicists from around the globe. The association’s members share information about their research, recognize achievements, and boost interest in physics among the next generation. This was the seventh OCPA conference to follow the initial meeting held in 1995. Each OCPA conference is enriched with local culture and sheds light on the research activities in the host region.

Plenary talks

First among the plenary speakers was Ching-Wu Paul Chu of the University of Houston, who began his talk by offering an inspiring and timely account of the history and recent development of high-temperature superconductivity. Lin I of National Central University (NCU) in Taiwan spoke of research on deeply quenched dusty plasma liquid in its relaxation processes. The audience also had the opportunity to receive firsthand information of the study on gene expression and regulation in living cells from Xiaoliang Sunney Xie of Harvard University, whose group pioneered coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microscopy and stimulated Raman scattering microscopy.

Michelle Wang of Cornell University gave an informative talk on novel single-molecule optical trapping techniques to probe the dynamics of DNA and the motor proteins. In the area of high-energy physics, Yuan-Hann Chang of NCU in Taiwan reviewed the recent status of the Large Hadron Collider. Chang’s team provided techniques for constructing a subdetector ‘preshower,’ a Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector. Nu Xu of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory spoke next about the exciting exploration of the early universe through high-energy physics experiments and nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The promising domain of free-electron lasers was covered in the talk by Zhirong Huang, who highlighted the Linac Coherent Light Source, the world’s first hard x-ray laser facility at SLAC, where Huang is based.

The eight parallel sessions covered a wide range of topics. The 268 speakers presented their research works or progress of ongoing projects under 11 topical groups: accelerator physics (24 speakers); atomic, molecular, and optics (25); astrophysics (15); chemical physics (24); condensed-matter physics (63); computational physics (13); gravitation and cosmology (15); high-energy physics (33); nuclear physics (26); plasma physics (19); and statistical and nonlinear physics (11).

Synchrotron light sources and other radiation facilities

Several synchrotron radiation facilities, proton and neutron sources, and colliders, which are under construction or being designed in Asia, attracted considerable attention at OCPA7. Xu Gang, Jingyu Tang, and Li Zhihui of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing gave updates on the developments of the Beijing Advanced Photon Source (in proposal), China Spallation Neutron Source (under construction), and Accelerator-Driven System (in design).

Ping-Jung Chou of the NSRRC briefed conference attendees about the Taiwan Photon Source, a synchrotron light source currently under construction. The new topic of hadron therapy accelerators was added to the program this year, hinting at the growing interest and investment in proton therapy in Asia. Guoqing Xiao and Jiancheng Yang of the Lanzhou branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences introduced the heavy-ion therapy facility that is presently under construction in Lanzhou (HITFiL).

Together with an introduction on hadronic charm decays by Cheng-Wei Chiang of NCU and the work of simulating a 16-channel proton-beam monitoring system presented by Chih-Hsun Lin of Academia Sinica, audiences were able to get a better picture of the research effort for proton accelerators carried out recently. Information of the first proton therapy accelerator in Taiwan, a project initiated in year 2010 at the Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, was also made available at the conference.

The well-attended awards banquet was held at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Kaohsiung. The awardees were lauded for their excellent work and contributions to the OCPA7. The closing ceremony held on 8 August marked the cheerful and successful conclusion of the conference. A full agenda and abstract of the talks has been posted on the OCPA7 website .

For more information about OCPA7, contact Diana Lin (NSRRC) and I-Chen Tsai (NSYSU).