Belinda Hung Outstanding Young Professorship

In his ground-breaking 2004 book Nanophotonics, Professor Paras N Prasad describes science as “an exciting new frontier” that “deals with the interaction of light with matter on a nanometer size scale”. Professor Prasad called nanophotonics a multidisciplinary field creating opportunities in physics, chemistry, applied sciences, engineering, biology and biomedical technology.

Since then, there has been a rapid growth in nanophotonics, nanotechnologies and photonic nanoscale interactions that scientists and researchers believe that it will lead to the development of compact nanometer-sized equipment, which could replace existing machines. This, in turn, could be used to develop new applications that can benefit the society.

Professor Yang Yi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and is the first recipient of the Belinda Hung Outstanding Young Professorship. He is also the awardee of the “MIT Innovators Under 35 China”, the “Excellent Young Scientists (Hong Kong and Macau)”, the “Asian Young Scientist Fellowship”, the “Croucher Innovation Awards”, and the “Tencent Xplorer Prize”.

Professor Yang works on optical physics and nanophotonics while his research focuses on the interaction of light with materials, free electrons, and synthetic gauge fields. His work also covers topological photonics, plasmonics, photonic crystals, free electron optics.

His past work includes a general framework that incorporates nonclassical optical responses at the extreme nanoscale, synthesis, and observation of non-Abelian gauge fields in real space, an upper limit to spontaneous free-electron radiation in arbitrary photonic environments, and the observation of enhanced free-electron-light interaction from photonic flatbands.

Professor Yang is the Principal Investigator of the Nano-optics Group at HKU’s Department of Physics, where he leads a team of postdoctoral, PhD and undergraduate students. His team studies how light behaves at the nanoscale - shorter than the wavelength of light - and the interaction of light with materials at the extreme nanoscale. The group also explores nanophotonic or plasmonic phenomena for devices, such as lasers, lenses and imaging applications. Additionally, the team is also interested in studying more fundamental topics, such as non-Hermitian physics.

He believes his research and findings in nanophotonics could have ramifications in the future for both commercial applications and fundamental scientific research. Further to this, Professor Yang has a number of joint international patents related to nanophotonics and is a recognised researcher in this field.

Professor Yang obtained his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Peking University and a PhD degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He continued his postdoctoral research at MIT before joining HKU’s Department of Physics in 2022. He is a reviewer for a number of Science magazines including Science, Nature Photonics, Nature Physics, and Physical Review Letters.

In February 2024, Professor Yang's review titled “Non-Abelian physics in light and sound” was published in Science. In January 2024, Professor Yang wrote a paper titled “Synthetic non-Abelian gauge fields for non-Hermitian systems” that appeared in Physical Review Letters. While in January 2023, the Yang Group’s invited review on free-electron nanophotonics appeared in Applied Physics Reviews. Their paper on flatbands for free-electron radiation was published in Nature the same month.

While in 2023, Professor Yang gave a number of key talks on developments in nanophotonics research. In summer, he gave a talk on “Non-Abelian gauge fields in non-Hermitian systems” in the International Conference on Metamaterials, Photonic Crystals and Plasmonics (META 2023). In September, he spoke about “Free‑electron‑light Interaction in Nanophotonics: Radiation Upper Limit and Flatband Enhancement” at the 8th Optoelectronics Global Conference in Shenzhen.