Academician Tai-Chang Chiang, emeritus and research professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), has been selected for the 2019 Arthur H. Compton Award, presented by the Advanced Photon Source Users Organization (APSUO), “for his ingenuity and insight in developing X-ray thermal diffuse scattering into an efficient quantitative method for phonon band structure studies.”
In addition to serving in the Scientific Advisory Committee from 2012, Academician Chiang has a long association with the NSRRC for supporting its development. Over his career course, he has made significant contributions to condensed-matter physics, surface science, and synchrotron radiation research. As an early pioneer of the angle-resolved photoemission technique for determining electron band structure of solids, surfaces and films, he later developed the thermal diffuse scattering (TDS) technique, which allows to determine phonon band structure of materials at synchrotron facilities.
Academician Chiang earned his bachelor's degree in physics from the National Taiwan University in 1971 and his doctoral degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. He completed a postdoctoral appointment at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, before joining the faculty at UIUC in 1980. He has been elected by the Academia Sinica to its 2016 class of Academicians.
The Arthur H. Compton award was established in 1995 by the APS Users Organization to recognize an important scientific or technical accomplishment at APS. The bi-annual awards are presented at the APS/CNM User Meetings. Arthur Compton was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927 for discovering and explaining the increase in the wavelengths of X-rays and gamma rays when they collide with and are scattered from loosely bound electrons in matter, known as the Compton Effect.