Prize Recipient


Hsiang-Hsi Kung
University of British Columbia

Citation:

"For thesis topic, "Collective Excitations in the Antisymmetric Channel of Raman Spectroscopy.""

Background:

Hsiang-Hsi (Sean) Kung received his Ph.D. in Physics from Rutgers University in 2017, under the supervision of Girsh Blumberg. He used polarization resolved Raman spectroscopy to study the collective modes in nonmagnetic materials that transform as pseudovectors, e.g. the A2g representation in the D4h and D3d point groups. He is the first to identify and explain the A2g collective mode in the “hidden order” phase of the heavy fermion metal URu2Si2, and thus uniquely determined the broken symmetry in the ordered state which has long puzzled the community. He discovered the transverse collective spin mode of the surface Dirac fermions in the topological insulator Bi2Se3, which is analogous to a spin wave in a partially polarized Fermi liquid. He also made first observation of circularly polarized photoluminescence from chiral excitons on the surface of Bi2Se3. His dissertation made important contributions to the understanding of collective chiral excitations in the heavy fermion metals and topological insulators. His dissertation work has received the Richard J. Plano Dissertation Prize (2018), the NAGS Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award (2019) and the Springer-Nature Thesis Award (2019). He is now a QMI Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia. Working with Andrea Damascelli, he is using time and angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy to study the emergent phenomena in 2D quantum materials at ultrafast time scale.

 
 


Selection Committee:

2020 Selection Committee: Richard Greene (Chair), David Campbell, Vesna Mitrović, Ni Ni, Kyle Shen