Moses Hung-Wai Chan () is a Chinese-American physicist who is Evan Pugh Professor at

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvan ...

. He is an alumnus of

Bridgewater College Bridgewater College is a private liberal-arts college in Bridgewater, Virginia. Established in 1880, Bridgewater College admitted both men and women from the time of its founding and was the first four-year liberal arts college in Virginia to ...

and

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 teach an ...

, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1974 and was a postdoctoral associate at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

. He has been a professor at Penn State's University Park Campus since 1979. Through the years, Chan's work has spanned many diverse topics. For his numerous contributions to low-temperature physics, in 1996 he shared the prestigious

Fritz London Fritz Wolfgang London (March 7, 1900 – March 30, 1954) was a German physicist and professor at Duke University. His fundamental contributions to the theories of chemical bonding and of intermolecular forces (London dispersion forces) are today c ...

Memorial prize with

Carl Wieman Carl Edwin Wieman (born March 26, 1951) is an American physicist and educationist at Stanford University, and currently the A.D White Professor at Large at Cornell University. In 1995, while at the University of Colorado Boulder, he and Eric All ...

and Eric A. Cornell. He was elected a member of the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

in 2000, and a fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

in 2004. Chan is known for the experimental discovery of evidence for a new

supersolid In condensed matter physics, a supersolid is a spatially ordered material with superfluid properties. In the case of helium-4, it has been conjectured since the 1960s that it might be possible to create a supersolid. Starting from 2017, a defin ...

quantum In physics, a quantum (plural quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity (physical property) involved in an interaction. The fundamental notion that a physical property can be "quantized" is referred to as "the hypothesis of quantizati ...

state of matter, predicted theoretically in 1969 by Alexander Andreev and Ilya Liftshitz, and its subsequent refutation. Other significant discoveries include the experimental observation of Critical Casimir effect and the experimental confirmation of 2D

Ising model The Ising model () (or Lenz-Ising model or Ising-Lenz model), named after the physicists Ernst Ising and Wilhelm Lenz, is a mathematical model of ferromagnetism in statistical mechanics. The model consists of discrete variables that represent ...

References

External links

His faculty page at Penn State University
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chan, Moses H. W. 1946 births Living people 20th-century American physicists 21st-century American physicists Bridgewater College alumni Cornell University alumni Duke University fellows Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the American Physical Society Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Pennsylvania State University faculty People from Xi'an People's Republic of China emigrants to the United States Physicists from Shaanxi Educators from Shaanxi