Biography

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 η mesons at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility (LAMPF) and made the first (π,η) measurements on nuclei. In the early 1980s, Professor Peng proposed the (π+,K⁺) measurements at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) accelerator, which ultimately identified single-particle states of lambda hypernuclei. 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 E906), 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 ten experiments carried out at various laboratories.

More recently, Professor Peng initiated a program at the Jefferson Laboratory to measure the novel transverse momentum dependent parton distribution. His group at UIUC also demonstrated the feasibility of the dressed-spin technique for a future experiment to search for neutron electric dipole moment. He has been actively involved in the Daya Bay neutrino oscillation experiment which discovered the neutrino mixing angle θ₁₃ in 2012. Professor Peng is a Fellow of the Amercian Physical Society.

Research Statement

Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment

The UIUC group has been a member of the Daya Bay Collaboration since the experiment was proposed in 2006. Using eight identically designed 20-ton detectors located at three underground experimental halls, antineutrinos from three pairs of reactor cores are detected. The UIUC group contributed to the R&D, testing, and commissioning of the Daya Bay PMT system. In March 2012, the Daya Bay experiment observed clear neutrino oscillation signals and announced the discovery of the neutrino mixing angle θ₁₃. The UIUC group has made significant contributions to the precise extraction of the mixing angle θ₁₃ and the mass-squared difference, |Δ m²|. It has also led the effort to search for light sterile neutrinos. The Daya Bay experiment will continue to take data until the end of 2017.

SeaQuest Experiment at Fermilab

The SeaQuest experiment at Fermilab measures high-mass dileptons to explore the antiquark structure of the nucleon and nuclei via the Drell-Yan process. The 120 GeV proton beam from the Main Injectorat Fermilab and a newly constructed dilepton spectrometer are utilized for this experiment. The major physics goals of the SeaQuest experiment include the investigation of the flavor asymmetry of the antiquarks in the proton, and the modification of antiquarks in the nuclei. SeaQuest started data-taking in early 2014, and will continue until summer of 2017.

Research Honors

• Breakthrough Prize, 2016
• Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Academia Sinica, 2015
• Fellow, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 2000
• Fellow, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1996
• Fellow, American Physical Society, 1993

Semesters Ranked Excellent Teacher by Students

Selected Articles in Journals

• Jen-Chieh Peng, Wen-Chen Chang, Randall Evan McClellan, and Oleg Teryaev, "Interpretation of Angular Distributions of Z-boson Production at Colliders", Phys. Lett. B758, 384 (2016).
• F. P. An et al. (Daya Bay Collaboration). "Measurement of the Reactor Antineutrino Flux and Spectrum at Daya Bay", Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 061801 (2016).
• F. P. An et al. (Daya Bay Collaboration), "New Measurement of Antineutrino Oscillation with the Full Detector Configuration at Daya Bay", Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 111802 (2015).
• Jen-Chieh Peng, "Daya Bay: Results and Perspectives", Nucl. Part. Phys. Proc. 265-266, 105 (2015).
• Wen-Chen Chang and Jen-Chieh Peng, "Extraction of the intrinsic light-quark sea in the proton", Phys. Rev. D92, 054020 (2015).
• Jen-Chieh Peng, "Transverse Spin Effects in Future Drell-Yan Experiments", EPJ Web Conf. 85, 01009 (2015).
• J.C. Peng and J.W. Qiu, "Novel phenomenology of parton distributions from the Drell-Yan process", Prog. Part. Nucl. Phys. 76, 43-75 (2014).
• W.C. Chang and J.C. Peng, "Flavor Structure of the Nucleon Sea", Prog. Part. Nucl. Phys. 79, 95-135 (2014).
• J. C. Peng et al., "On the momentum dependence of the flavor structure of the nucleon sea", Phys. Lett. B736, 411 (2014).
• F. P. An et al. (Daya Bay Collaboration), "Search for a Light Sterile Neutrino at Daya Bay", Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 141802 (2014).
• F. P. An et al., (Daya Bay Collaboration), "Spectral measurement of electron antineutrino oscillation amplitude and frequency at Daya Bay", Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 061801 (2014).
• Keh-Fei Liu, Wen-Chen Chang, Hai-Yang Cheng, and Jen-Chieh Peng, "Connected-Sea Partons", Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 252002 (2012).
• F. P. An et al. (Daya Bay Collaboration), "Observation of Electron-Antineutrino Disappearance at Daya Bay", Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 171803 (2012).
• Wen-Chen Chang and Jen-Chieh Peng, "Extraction of Various Five-Quark Components of the Nucleons", Phys. Lett. B704, 197 (2011).
• Wen-Chen Chang and Jen-Chieh Peng, Flavor Asymmetry of the Nucleon Sea and the Five-Quark Components of the Nucleons", Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 252002 (2011).
• X. Qian et al., "Single Spin Asymmetries in Charged Pion Production from Semi-Inclusive Deep Inelastic Scattering on a Transversely Polarized He-3 Target", Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 072003 (2011).
• J.T. Londergan, J.C. Peng, A.W. Thomas, "Charge symmetry at the partonic level", Review of Modern Physics, 82, 2009-2052 (2010).
• A. Esler et al., "Dressed Spin of Helium-3", Phys. Rev. C76, 051302 (2007).
• L..Y. Zhu et al. (FNAL-E866 Collaboration), "Measurement of Angular Distribution of Drell-Yan Dimuons in p+d Interaction", Phy. Rev. Lett. 99, 082301 (2007).
• G. T. Garvey and J. C. Peng, "Flavor Asymmetry of Light Quarks in the Nucleon Sea", Prog. Part. Nucl. Phys. 47, 203-243 (2001).
• P.L. McGaughey, J.M. Moss, and J.C. Peng, "High-energy hadron induced dilepton production from nucleons and nuclei", Annu. Rev. Nucl. Part. Sci. 49, 217-253 (1999).
• J. C. Peng et al. (E866 Collaboration), "d-bar/u-bar asymmetry and the origin of the nucleon sea", Phys. Rev. D58, 092004 (1998).