Recently, the 2011 Thomson Reuters Awards for Excellence honored 11 scientists for their outstanding contributions in seven emerging fields. NTHU Professor Kingman Cheung of the Department of Physics received one of the awards for his remarkable achievements in unparticle physics phenomenology.

In 1992, Prof. Cheung obtained his Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison. He then took post-doctoral positions at Northwestern University, the University of Texas-Austin, and the University of California at Davis in the field of collider phenomenology and physics research beyond standard models. Since his return in 2000, he has published over 80 papers in top physics journals, including 5 papers published by Physical Review Letters.

A new zone has been theorized in particle physics that scale invariance exists in high-energy interaction, it is not detectable under normal conditions, but its existence may have an extraordinary impact on current and future high-energy experiments. Initially, Professor Georgi of Harvard University hypothesized that a new zone with scale invariance and a complex infrared constant point, known as unparticles, can be used to describe the particle world when particles interact at high levels of energy. Furthermore, in the CERN laboratory at the border of Geneva and France, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has begun to operate, aiming to capture the evolution of physics. It is a mechanic stimulating the origin of the universe, it can also represent the first ten nanoseconds after the Big Bang. Therefore, unparticle physics may be the new physics that transcends the standard model with the technology of Large Hadron Collider.

Prof. Cheung expressed his gratitude to the Thomson Reuters Taiwan Research Day and Research Front Awards, and expressed his appreciation for the encouragement and supports he had received from colleagues and students in the Department of Physics at NTHU, as well as the support from his beloved family. He further thanked Professor Wai-Yee Keung of University of Illinois at Chicago, and Dr. Tzu-Chiang Yuan, an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Physics at Academia Sinica for their long term support and encouragement.