Department of Physics at the U of I

Professor Peng received his bachelor's degree in physics from Tunghai University in Taiwan in 1970 and his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1975. He worked as a researcher at the Centre d'Etudes Nucleaires de Saclay and the University of Pittsburgh before joining the Physics Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1978. He became a Laboratory Fellow at Los Alamos in 1996. Professor Peng joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois in February 2002.

At Los Alamos, Professor Peng made pioneering contributions to several areas of medium energy physics. He was the first to recognize the feasibility of producing h mesons at the Los Alamos Meson Production Facility (LAMPF) and made the first (p,h) measurements on nuclei. In the early 1980s, Professor Peng proposed the (p⁺,K⁺) measurements at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) accelerator, which ultimately identified single-particle states of lambda hypernuclei far beyond what had been possible using the (K^-,p^-,) reaction. Since the late 1980s, Professor Peng has made seminal contributions to high-energy nuclear physics in a series of experiments at Fermilab (E772, E789, and E866), which pioneered the use of massive lepton pair production to probe the distributions of antiquarks in the nucleons and nuclei. Professor Peng was the spokesperson or co-spokesperson for eight experiments carried out at various laboratories.

Most recently, Professor Peng has led the effort to establish a proton-nucleus experimental program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). He is also actively involved in proposing a new experiment to measure the neutron electric dipole moment (EDM) using the technique of ultra-cold neutron production in superfluid helium. Professor Peng is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.