Yang worked on
statistical mechanics,
condensed matter theory,
particle physics and
gauge theory/
quantum field theory. Various Nobel Prizes in Physics are based on Yang's work. At least 10 Nobel laureates in Physics cited Yang's work during their Nobel speech, this includes:
Steven Weinberg (1979),
Sheldon Glashow (1979),
Martinus J. G. Veltman (1999),
Gerard 't Hooft (1999),
David Gross (1999),
Yoichiro Nambu (2008),
Makoto Kobayashi (2008),
Toshihide Maskawa (2008),
François Englert (2013) and
Peter Higgs (2013). At the University of Chicago, Yang first spent twenty months working in an accelerator lab, but found he was not good at
experimental physics and switched back to theory. His doctoral thesis was about an atomic beam apparatus for measuring the
nuclear quadrupole resonance of sodium. Later, Yang worked on particle phenomenology; a well-known work was the Fermi–Yang model of 1949, treating the
pion as a bound nucleon–antinucleon pair.
Main contributions Yang is well known for his 1953 collaboration with
Robert Mills in developing
non-abelian gauge theory, widely known as the
Yang–Mills theory.During the academic year 1953–54, Yang was a visitor to
Brookhaven National Laboratory ... I was at Brookhaven also ... and was assigned to the same office as Yang. Yang, who demonstrated on a number of occasions his generosity to physicists beginning their careers, told me about his idea of generalizing gauge invariance and we discussed it at some length ... I was able to contribute something to the discussions, especially with regard to the quantization procedures, and to a small degree in working out the formalism; however, the key ideas were Yang's.
The Scientist called Yang–Mills theory: The foundation for the current understanding of how subatomic particles interact is a contribution which has restructured modern physics and mathematics.In 1956, he and T. D. Lee analyzed a problem known as the τ–θ puzzle, in which a particle called θ decayed into two
pions and a particle τ into three pions, the two decays with different
parity symmetry. The results were also confirmed by two other independent experiments by
Valentine Telegdi and
Jerome Isaac Friedman at the
University of Chicago and by
Richard Garwin and
Leon M. Lederman at
Columbia University. Their 1975 paper, known as the
Wu–Yang dictionary, helped bridge gaps between physics and differential geometry. On Yang's retirement from SUNY in 1999,
Freeman Dyson called Yang "the pre-eminent stylist" of 20th-century physics alongside
Albert Einstein and
Paul Dirac, citing how Yang "turns his least important calculations into miniature works of art, and turns his deeper speculations into masterpieces." Physicist
Kenneth Young opened the ceremony. with 13 of his seminal contributions engraved on the faces of the cube. On the cube is also written "Congratulations on Professor Chen Ning Yang's 90th birthday" in Chinese. The cube also includes an ancient Chinese poem used by Yang in his 2013
Selected Papers and Commentaries; it reads: • Statistical mechanics: •
Phase transitions (1952): for his works with Lee on the
Lee–Yang theory and the
Lee–Yang theorem, which describe the liquid-gas phase transition based on microscopic properties.). •
ODLRO (1962): for his development of the concept of
off-diagonal long-range order (ODLRO) that characterizes
macroscopic quantum phenomena like superconductivity and superfluidity. • Neutrino experiment (1960): for the Lee and Yang paper that proposed to study the weak interaction with high energy neutrinos. This work promoted various neutrino experiments. • CP nonconservation (1964): for his paper on
CP violation, in collaboration with T. T. Wu. • Field theory: • Gauge theory (1954): for
Yang–Mills theory, in collaboration with
Robert Mills. • Integral formalism (1974): for giving meaning to the nonintegral phase factor in gauge theories. • Fiber bundle (1975): for the
Wu–Yang dictionary, in collaboration with T. T. Wu. == Awards and honors==