AWARDEE OF PHYSICS PRIZE

GAN ZIZHAO

Prof. Gan Zizhao was born in Xinyi City of Guangdong Province in April 1938.After graduation in Department of Physics of Peking University on September 1959, he became a postgraduate student (1959.10-1963.1) and then work as a teacher in same Department up to now. In 1983, he became a professor of this department. He had serviced as the Chairman of the Academic Committee (1986-1991) of this department and the Head of this department (1991-2001). In 1991, he was elected the academician of the Chinese Academy of Science.
The main research fields of Prof. Gan are the condensed matter physics and the optics physics. In 1960s, he developed the theory for the impurity-induced tunneling and the high order tunneling processes in semiconductors. In 1970s, he propose the possibility of a high power continuous CO2 hydrodynamic laser by combustion of CO gas, then built this experimental device and realized lasing together his colleague in Peking University. In the end of 1970s, he supposed the dissociation of polyatomic molecule in an intense infrared laser field is a single molecular multi-photon absorption process induced by the nonlinear coupling between the vibration modes and work together Yang Guozhen to developed a theory to describe this processes.
In 1980s, Gan collaborated with Yang Guozhen have developed the theory of coherent propagation of a light wave in semiconductors, and discussed the multi-photon processes and the self-transparency in semiconductors. Also in 1980s, Gan and P.A. Lee have developed a theory for the nuclear-spin relaxation near the metal-insulator transition. Gan and Su Zhaobin treated the ground state of the fractional quantum Hall effect from the point view of low-dimension strong coupling plasma.
After 1986, the major efforts of Gan turn to the research and development for high temperature superconductivity, he was in charge the National Expert Committee for the R&D of Superconductivity of China in May 1987. Beside the works for this Committee, Gan also made some theoretical and experimental works about the microscopic mechanism of high temperature superconductivity, the physics of Josephson junction in superconducting oxides, the effects of impurities for high temperature superconductivity, the charge distribution in a non-uniform superconductors, etc.
In the beginning of 1990s, Gan promoted the research of mesoscopic physics, and in charge to set up a National Key Laboratory for the mesoscopic physics in Peking University. In last few years, Gan made great efforts to developed the optoelectronic device based on GaN .