Prof. Pisin Chen Awarded 2023 European Physical Society Hannes Alfvén Prize

The 2023 Hannes Alfvén Prize, awarded by the European Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics (EPS-DPP), has been jointly presented to Professors Pisin Chen (陳丕燊) from National Taiwan University, Jamie Rosenzweig, and Chandrashekhar Joshi from UCLA in Bordeaux, France. This prestigious prize recognizes their exceptional contributions in proposing, demonstrating, and conducting groundbreaking experiments on plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFA) driven by particle beams. The recipients have made significant advancements in different areas of the field, including the development of theoretical concepts, the execution of pioneering demonstration experiments, and the guidance of applications for this acceleration technique. Prof. Pisin Chen graciously accepted the prize and delivered a speech during the ceremony.

Prof. Pisin Chen is the NTU Chee-Chun Leung Distinguished Chair Professor of Cosmology and the Founding Director of Leung Center for Cosmology and Particle Astrophysics (LeCosPA). He is also the Distinguished Chair Professor of the Physics Department. This is yet one more recognition to Prof. Chen’s exceptional scientific contributions after his receiving the Blaise Pascal Chair bestowed by the Government of Ile de France in 2018.

The citation of Prof. Chen’s accomplishments states: “Prof. Pisin Chen is regarded as the inventor of PWFA and played a key role in the theoretical development of the plasma wakefield accelerator principle, energy transfer and beam loading, and plasma lenses at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the 1980s. The extreme gradients and energy gains obtainable from PWFA was a pathbreaking innovation at the energy frontier, and the extreme focusing with plasma lenses was a pathbreaking innovation at the luminosity frontier. He led an experiment at SLAC that successfully demonstrated the plasma lens principle as predicted.”