Wang Yifang

Wang Yifang (born February 1963 in Jiangsu Province ) is a Chinese elementary particle and accelerator physicist. He is director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and is known for his contributions to neutrino physics , in particular his leading role (with Kam-Biu Luk ) in the Daya Bay experiment to determine the last unknown neutrino mixing angle θ ₁₃ (see neutrino oscillation ).

After completing his bachelor's degree in physics at the University of Nanking (1984), he worked with Samuel CC Ting on the L3 experiment of the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) at CERN . In 1991/92 he was at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare , received his doctorate in 1991 from the University of Florence , was at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1992 to 1996 and at Stanford University from 1996 to 2001 . From 2001 he was back in China at the IHEP as professor and deputy director of the Center for Experimental Physics. In 2011 he became director there.

Besides L3 (where he was group leader, responsible for the search for new particles and multi-photon analysis) and Daya-Bay at the Alpha-Magnet-Spectrometer , a satellite experiment for cosmic radiation by Samuel CC Ting, at the KamLand -Neutrino experiment in Kamioka and Palo Verde Neutrion Experiment. From him:

• A new method for determining optimal energy and baseline in long baseline neutrino experiments
• the swap method for the elimination of time-symmetrical interference background for the determination of time-asymmetrical signals, especially in neutrino physics
• a new calculation of the disturbing neutron background from cosmic rays
• the proposal of a water tank-based Cherenkov calorimeter and a new type of detector for solar neutrinos

He was responsible for the third expansion stage of the detector (BES III) in the Beijing Electron Positron Collider . Until 2011 he was its project manager and spokesman for the collaboration.

He heads (2014) the JUNO experiment to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy with neutrinos from nuclear reactors.

In 2014 he received the Panofsky Prize with Kam-Biu Luk and in 2016 the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics . For 2016 he was awarded the Bruno Pontecorvo Prize .

On January 18, 2017, he received an honorary doctorate from the Ruhr University Bochum for his research in the field of neutrino oscillation.

Fonts

Daya Bay collaboration:

• FP An et al., Observation of Electron-Antineutrino Disappearance at Daya Bay, Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 171803 (2012), Arxiv .

Web links

• Website at the IHEP
• Panofsky Prize

Individual evidence

1. ^ Neutrino-Physics with Juno , Preprint 2015

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Wang is the family name here, Yifang is the first name.