AWARDEE OF PHYSICS PRIZE

OUYANG ZHONGCAN

Prof. OuYang, a theoretical physicist, was born on Jan.25, 1946，in Quanzhou, Fujian Province of China. He graduated from Automatics Department, Tsinghua University, Beijing，in 1968. From 1968 to 1978 he served as an assistant engineer in Lanzhou Chemical Industry Co. He returned to Tsinghua University in 1978 and received his Ph.D. in 1984, then worked the next two years in the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ITP-CAS) as a postdoctoral fellow. From 1987 to 1988 he worked with Prof. W. Helfrich at FU Berlin as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation fellow. In 1989 he joined ITP-CAS, first as an associated professor and then (1992) as a full professor. He has been serving as the director of the institute since 1998.
He has made distinguished contributions to a number of important subjects in soft condensed matter and statistical physics. He found the shape equation of fluid membrane vesicle and then worked out a rigorous solution which is exactly the same as the biconcave shape of red blood cells. This result resolves a long-standing puzzle in physiology. In 1990 he predicted a torus solution in which the radii of the two generating circles r and R must satisfy the condition r/R= 1/2 or  0, and this was very soon confirmed by experiments. In the same year, he and his collaborators presented a theory (generalized in 1998) to describe the helical structures of chiral bilayers which shows a good agreement with experimental observations. In 1993, OuYang and his collaborators suggested a theory for domain formation of Smectic-A LC (SmA), and later solved the most general variation problem for SmA curvature elastic energy to reveal the formation of focal conic domain (FCD). By analogy to SmA theory, they also succeeded to explain the coil formation in multishell carbon nanotubes. In recent years, he and his students focused on the study of the statistical elasticity of double-strand DNA molecule and hairpin-coil transition of single-strand DNA/RNA. He has been invited to report their results at several international conferences, such as 21stIUPAP International Conference of Statistical Physics. In collaboration with experimental groups in USA, they calculated elastic modulus of wafl DNA (a response element for p53 regulatory protein), and found it is only 1/3 of the modulus of random-sequence DNA. This result sheds light on the mechanism of the tumor-suppressor activity of p53. So far he has publishedabout 90 papers on famous international journals, one monograph in English (also an extended Chinese edition), and a booklet of popular science which is highly praised among readers. For these achievements, he has been awarded several renowned prizes, and elected as a member of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1997, a member of Third World Academy of Sciences in 2003. In the past 15 years he educated about 20 students and some of them have become excellent physicists in China.