American Physical Society names Kun Yang a fellow

Professor Kun Yang, a condensed matter physicist, has been named a 2011 fellow of the American Physical Society (APS).

According to the citation, Yang is being honored “for significant theoretical contributions to our understanding of novel phenomena in quantum Hall systems.”

APS fellowship “is limited to no more than one-half of 1 percent of the society’s membership and is a significant recognition by a scientist’s peers of his or her outstanding contributions to physics,” according to the website of the FSU Department of Physics.

Kun Yang

Yang’s scientific work received another type of high-profile recognition recently. Predictions made through calculations published by Yang and FSU physicist Oskar Vafek in 2010 about bi-layer graphene were confirmed experimentally by Nobel laureates in 2011, who published their results in the Aug. 12, 2011 edition of Science magazine.

Graphene, a naturally occurring material that is stronger than diamond but can be stretched like rubber, has been hailed by scientists as a wonder material. Bi-layer graphene is two layers instead of one.

Yang has been a member of the Florida State faculty since 1999. Before that, he was a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology and a postdoctoral associate at Princeton University.

To read more about his work, go to http://www.physics.fsu.edu/