Chiang awarded 2015 Davisson-Germer Prize

Professor Tai-Chang Chiang has been selected to receive the 2015 Davisson-Germer Prize in Surface or Atomic Physics. Chiang shares this honor with his colleague Miquel Salmeron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Chiang’s citation reads: “For his elegant demonstration of multiple quantum well resonances in metallic thin films achieved by growing films of unprecedented uniformity, and his demonstration and use of quantum effects to understand and control the stability of thin films.”

Chiang is a member of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory (MRL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where his research group has contributed seminal breakthroughs in semiconductor and metal surfaces, interfaces, and thin films. Using high-precision photoemission and x-ray diffraction techniques, his team uncovers these materials’ electronic properties, growth morphology (sub-monolayer adsorption to thin film growth), quantum-well structures, and interfacial atomic structure with an eye to potential technological applications.

In addition to his exceptional experimental achievements, Professor Chiang is a gifted theorist who is able to develop theoretical models for his experimental results.

“My research focuses on the basic physics of materials at the nanoscale and under extreme conditions, where their electronic properties and atomic structure can be strongly affected by surface and quantum effects,” explains Chiang. “The goal is to deliver new understandings of material behavior and engineering principles for tailored systems relevant to applications.”

Chiang was one of the first to demonstrate that atoms of single-crystal surfaces have binding energies different from the bulk atoms and that the energy shifts are detectable with photoemission, using synchrotron radiation as a light source. He pioneered the application of angle-resolved and core-level photoemission to interface, quantum-well, and superlattice research and expanded it to include novel configurations.

Chiang carries out some of his research at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, at the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at the Synchrotron Radiation Center (SRC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Chiang comments, “I am honored to be a recipient of the award and wish to thank my friends, colleagues, and collaborators for their help and support. I am especially indebted to my present and former group members who have contributed enormously to our research.”

Chiang’s long list of professional service to his discipline includes advisory work on several international committees. He served as the scientific director of the SRC from 2010 to 2014. Prior to that, he served as head of the MRL Solid State Sciences and Materials Chemistry Program from 1991 to 2006, and as MRL's associate director from 1999 to 2006. He served on the Board of Governors for UNICAT at the Argonne National Laboratory from 1995 to 2008. He has also held an honorary chair professorship appointment at Tsing Hua University in Taiwan (2008-2011), a visiting chair professorship at National Taiwan University (2007-2010), and a chair professorship at National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan (2013-2016).

Chiang has received numerous recognitions for his research. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is a recipient of the IBM Faculty Development Award (1984-85, the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1984-89), and the Xerox Award for Faculty Research (1985).

Chiang received his bachelor’s degree from the National Taiwan University in 1971. He went on to receive his doctoral degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, before joining the faculty at Physics Illinois in 1980.

The Davisson-Germer Prize in Surface or Atomic Physics was established in 1965 to recognize outstanding scientific work in America in the areas of atomic physics or surface physics. It is administered by the American Physical Society and is sponsored by AT&T Bell Laboratories (now Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent Technologies) with additional support from the Chape Family Trust.

The prize will be presented at a special ceremonial session at the 2015 APS March Meeting (March 2-6, 2015) in San Antonio, TX.