Francis F. Chen

Francis F. Chen (born November 18, 1929 in Canton , China ) is a Chinese-born American physicist who deals with plasma physics.

Chen studied at Harvard University , where he received his bachelor's degree in astronomy in 1950, his master's degree in physics in 1953 and his PhD in 1954. At that time he dealt with high energy physics (proton-proton scattering and proton-nucleus scattering with energies already above 1 GeV). From 1954 he was at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (where he initially worked on stellarators ), where he stayed until 1969, when he became Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has been Professor Emeritus there since 1994. He was a visiting scientist at the nuclear research center in Fontenay-aux-Roses in 1962/63 , in 1977 in Lausanne and 1985 in Australia and Japan.

Chen dealt with basic research in plasma physics as well as fusion with magnetic confinement and inertial fusion, but also with low-energy plasma physics for industrial applications, for example in the semiconductor industry. He works both theoretically and experimentally. Further fields of work were plasma diagnostics, accelerator concepts with plasmas, helicon plasma sources, instabilities of plasma-laser interaction, Langmuir samples, resistive drift waves, anomalous diffusion , Q machines. He wrote a well-known in the USA plasma physics textbook.

Since 1968 he has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), whose James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics he received in 1995. In 1983 he was chairman of the plasma physics section of the APS. Since 1980 he has been a Fellow of the IEEE , whose Plasma Physics and Applications Award he received in 1994.

Fonts

• Introduction to Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion , 2nd edition, Plenum Press, New York 1984
• with Jane Chang Lecture Notes on Principles of Plasma Processing , Springer 2003

Web links

• Biography at Princeton University Press
• Laudation for Maxwell Prize
• Biography at the APS