Li Yang was installed as the Albert Gordon Hill Professor of Physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis in a ceremony held Nov. 7 at the Whittemore House. Yang delivered an installation address titled “Exploring Quantum Mechanics at Nanoscale with Petascale Computing.”
In his remarks, Yang described density functional theory, a Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough by Austrian chemist Walter Kohn that made it possible to calculate the interactions between electrons in a material. Yang’s team at WashU harnesses this basic idea to search for and create new materials, including substances with interesting quantum properties.
“With petascale computing power, we can atomically design new structures never realized in the lab,” Yang said. “We combine powerful simulations with novel materials to predict and understand new quantum phenomena.”
Researchers in the Yang lab investigate a wide range of quantum material properties, including optical properties, electronic behavior, magnetism, multiferroic effects and the potential applications of quantum sensing in semiconductors.
Albert Gordon Hill earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in physics from WashU in the early 1930s. He earned his doctorate in physics from the University of Rochester and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for 47 years. Hill received a Washington University Distinguished Alumni award in 1955. His association with the university runs deep; his grandmother’s uncle, Wayman Crow, was a WashU founder.
Read more about Yang, Hill and watch Yang’s installation address on the Ampersand website.
