Bian to receive Yee Fellowship from College of Engineering

Physics graduate student Guang Bian has been selected to receive the 2011/12 Yee Memorial Fellowship. The prestigious award, which is named for Illinois alumnus Warren Yee (PhD, Civil Engineering, 1943), is presented annually by the College of Engineering at Illinois to recognize outstanding research achievements by a Chinese graduate student.

A member of Professor T.-C. Chiang’s research group, Bian studies the properties of thin films and multilayer systems that exhibit strong spin-orbit coupling, including the newly discovered “topological” materials that support a surface spin current protected by time-reversal symmetry against defect scattering. Professor Chiang nominated Bian for the fellowship.

“So far I have performed angular resolved photoemission (ARPES) measurements on systems such as Sb, Bi, and Au films and a Bi-Ag surface alloy. The interplay between spin-orbit coupling and quantum size effects gives rise to many interesting properties in the electronic structure and spin texture of those systems,” said Bian. “These materials are of great interest for spintronics applications.”

Bian has pursued his interest in physics from his home in the grasslands of Mongolia to the prairielands of Illinois. After receiving a bachelor’s and master’s degree in physics from Tsinghua University in Beijing, Bian enrolled in the graduate program in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007.

At Illinois, he served as the secretary of the Overseas China Education Foundation-UIUC Branch from 2007 to 2008. The goal of the foundation is to raise funds to promote primary education in rural areas of China.

In 2010, Bian received the prestigious Aladdin Lamp Award, presented by the Synchrotron Radiation Center, for his work on metastability, structural transitions, topological order, and spin separation in Bi and Sb films.