Research

Our on-campus facilities in observational astrophysics include a 40 cm diameter reflector telescope located on the top of the CYM physics building equipped with charged couple device (CCD) imager and spectrometer, and two 2.3 m diameter Small Radio Telescopes all used for teaching, training and outreach. For professional observational astrophysics research we win access to a wide range of cutting-edge international telescopes via competitive peer review. These include ground based facilities such as the Gemini 8-metre Telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, the 8-metre telescopes of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, telescopes of the Beijing Astronomical Observatories and South African and Australian facilities. We also win access to space based facilities like the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The quality of our projects and proposals leads to success in gaining such access on a regular basis. We are currently building MoUs with key strategic partners in the mainland such as the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University, the Space and Astronomy group at Nanjing University and the microsatellites research group at Zhejiang University. These links will provide enhanced opportunities for our students in elite mainland research groups.

We focus on optical and electrical properties of nanostructures and emerging semiconductors. The laboratory is equipped with a home-made confocal spectroscopy system, a time-resolved spectroscopy system and an electric charactering system.

We focus on optical and electrical properties of nanostructures and emerging semiconductors. The laboratory is equipped with a home-made confocal spectroscopy system, a time-resolved spectroscopy system and an electric charactering system.

The laboratory is equipped with variable-temperature (4.2 K-300 K) photoluminescence (PL), variable-temperature (1.5 K-300 K) magneto-PL (up to 7 T) with super high spectral resolution, a confocal scanning Raman microscopy/spectroscopy system, broadband variable-temperature (8 K-330 K) emission/ absorption/ reflectance/ photocurrent spectroscopy, time-resolved PL system, and a near field scanning microscope. The existing laser sources include He-Cd laser, He-Ne laser, Ar-Kr mixed gas laser, high-energy YAG pulse laser, and semiconductor laser diode array pumped femtosecond broadband lasers.

This laboratory is equipped with fume cupboards, tube furnaces, a spin-coater, two thermal evaporators, and an electron-beam/sputtering deposition system. Our material characterization facilities include UV/Vis/NIR spectrometers for LED characterization and setups for power conversion efficiency and external quantum efficiency measurements for solar cells.

Specialised equipment includes: Laplace transformed deep level transient spectroscopy system; Liquid nitrogen optical cryostat; 10 K liquid He free optical cryostat; Electrical characterization equipment: semiconductor parameter analyzer, multi-frequency LCR meter, pico-ammeter, electrometer, and etc.; Photoluminescence system: 30 mW HeCd laser, 500 mm monochrometer, PMT and CCD detecting system; UV-visible spectrophotometer; Radio frequency magnetron sputtering system; Pulsed laser deposition system; Chemical vapor deposition system; Electron beam evaporator; Thermal evaporator; Tube furnace and box furnace.

Big “off campus” equipment accessible to our students and staff: Positron beam time at the electron LINAC ELBE in the Center for High-Power Radiation Sources, Helmoltz Zentrum Dresden Rossendorf (HZDR), Germany for positron annihilation spectroscopic (PAS) study.

This includes Multi-chamber ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) systems for material synthesis and characterizations by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy (STM/S), low and high-energy electron diffraction (LEED/RHEED), and ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy (UPS).

A joint consortium for fundamental physics of the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, was formed in 2013. Under this umbrella, a Hong Kong cluster formally joined the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in June 2014. One of the missions led by the Hong Kong cluster is to build up a Tier-2 (and Tier-3) computing center in Hong Kong, which is expected to play an important role in serving both the LHC physics community and the local scientific and engineering community. The center is designed to have 1000 processing cores and 1 petabytes of disk space.

The laboratory is the part of the Tier-2 (and Tier-3) computing center for analyzing data collected by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in CERN. The lab has access to the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid, which is the world's largest computing grid.

A cutting-edge Gamma-ray detector array and charged particle detector array, based on international collaborations, will be developed to achieve high-efficient and high-resolution measurements for the studies of nuclear structure. The arrays are designed for easy configuration and full integration with other devices to meet the detection requirements of specific major experiments, which will be performed in the Radioactive-Isotope Beams facilities worldwide such as RIKEN (Japan) and NSCL/FRIB (United States).

For Theoretical Studies, besides the central computing facility of the university, staff and students of the department have at their disposal an IBM Computer Cluster 1 master + 12 slave blade dedicated to research.