Tung-Mow Yan (; born 1937) is a Taiwanese-born American physicist, who has specialized in

theoretical A theory is a rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon, or the results of such thinking. The process of contemplative and rational thinking is often associated with such processes as observational study or research. Theories may be ...

particle physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) and ...

; primarily in the structure of

elementary particle In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a subatomic particle that is not composed of other particles. Particles currently thought to be elementary include electrons, the fundamental fermions (quarks, leptons, antiq ...

s, the

standard model The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces ( electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions - excluding gravity) in the universe and classifying all known elementary particles. I ...

, and

quantum chromodynamics In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons. Quarks are fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion. QCD is a ty ...

. He is

professor emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to ...

Education

He graduated with a BS in physics in 1960 at

National Taiwan University National Taiwan University (NTU; ) is a public research university in Taipei, Taiwan. The university was founded in 1928 during Taiwan under Japanese rule, Japanese rule as the seventh of the Imperial Universities. It was named Taihoku Imper ...

(NTU), an MS in physics at

National Tsing Hua University National Tsing Hua University (NTHU; ) is a public research university in Hsinchu City, Taiwan. National Tsing Hua University was first founded in Beijing. After the Chinese Civil War, the then-president of the university, Mei Yiqi, and oth ...

(

Hsinchu Hsinchu (, Chinese: 新竹, Pinyin: ''Xīnzhú'', Wade–Giles: ''Hsin¹-chu²'') is a city located in northwestern Taiwan. It is the most populous city in Taiwan Province not among the special municipalities, with estimated 450,655 inha ...

) in 1962, and earned a Ph.D. in physics in 1968 at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

, under the supervision of

Julian Schwinger Julian Seymour Schwinger (; February 12, 1918 – July 16, 1994) was a Nobel Prize winning American theoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on quantum electrodynamics (QED), in particular for developing a relativistically invariant ...

Research

From 1970 to 2009 Yan worked at

, in particular the Cornell High-Energy Synchrotron Source and Laboratory for Elementary-Particle Physics (combined into the

Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based Sciences and Education The Cornell Laboratory for Accelerator-based Sciences and Education (CLASSE) is a particle accelerator facility located in Wilson Laboratory on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, NY. CLASSE formed from the merger of the Cornell High-Energy Syn ...

as of 2006). He became a professor in 19??. By 2010 he reached the status of professor emeritus in physics. Other affiliations during Yan's life and work are: *1968–1970: research associate at

SLAC SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Departme ...

*1973–1974: visiting scientist to SLAC *1977–1978: scientific associate at CERN *1974–1978:

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

*1986: visiting chair professor at the physics department of NTU *Since 1991: a fellow of the American Physical Society *1991–1992: special chair professor
Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica
ROC *1997: Director
National Center of Theoretical Sciences
ROC In the 1970s, Yan and

Sidney Drell Sidney David Drell (September 13, 1926 – December 21, 2016) was an American theoretical physicist and arms control expert. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and senior fello ...

investigated the important Drell–Yan process of massive

lepton In particle physics, a lepton is an elementary particle of half-integer spin (spin (physics), spin ) that does not undergo strong interactions. Two main classes of leptons exist: electric charge, charged leptons (also known as the electron-li ...

pair production Pair production is the creation of a subatomic particle and its antiparticle from a neutral boson. Examples include creating an electron and a positron, a muon and an antimuon, or a proton and an antiproton. Pair production often refers ...

hadron In particle physics, a hadron (; grc, ἁδρός, hadrós; "stout, thick") is a composite subatomic particle made of two or more quarks held together by the strong interaction. They are analogous to molecules that are held together by the ele ...

ic collisions, which provides a crucial experimental probe into the parton distribution functions. These describe the way that the

momentum In Newtonian mechanics, momentum (more specifically linear momentum or translational momentum) is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. It is a vector quantity, possessing a magnitude and a direction. If is an object's mass ...

of an incoming high-energy

nucleon In physics and chemistry, a nucleon is either a proton or a neutron, considered in its role as a component of an atomic nucleus. The number of nucleons in a nucleus defines the atom's mass number (nucleon number). Until the 1960s, nucleons w ...

is partitioned among its constituent partons. In the same decade, he pioneered the " Cornell potential" shedding light on the properties of heavy quark–antiquark systems ( charmonium), with

Estia J. Eichten Estia Joseph Eichten (born 1946), is an American theoretical physicist, of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). He received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics, where he was a student of Roman Jackiw ...

, Toichiro Kinoshita, Ken Lane and

Kurt Gottfried Kurt Gottfried (May 17, 1929 – August 25, 2022) was an Austrian-born American physicist who was professor emeritus of physics at Cornell University. He was known for his work in the areas of quantum mechanics and particle physics and was also ...

Works

Tung-Mow Yan is the author or co-author of the following books: * * and numerous physics publications in collaboration with other theoretical physicists, including

and

. According to

INSPIRE-HEP INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1970 ...

, as of 2016, he has authored or co-authored at least 72 publications, and has at least 11945 citations.

References

External links

* * {{Authority control Chinese physicists Theoretical physicists Particle physicists Cornell University faculty Fellows of the American Physical Society Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni People associated with CERN 1937 births Living people National Taipei University alumni National Tsing Hua University alumni