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WIU Physics Professor Emeritus Yan Lwin at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, March 2008
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WIU Physics Professor Emeritus Invited to Prestigious Institute

May 15, 2008

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MACOMB, IL - - Western Illinois University physics Professor Emeritus Yan Lwin has been invited to participate in the "Particle Physics in the Age of the Large Hadron Collider" conference to be held Friday-Saturday, May 30-31 at the University of California, Santa Barbara Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.

The conference will address the development and completion of the particle accelerator and hadron collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC is expected to become the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It is being funded and built in collaboration with more than 2,000 physicists from 34 countries and hundreds of universities and laboratories.

It is theorized that when activated, the LHC will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics, as well as explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.

"The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, which has been in operation since 1979, is funded by the National Science Foundation and the University of California. The general purpose of the institute is to contribute to the progress of theoretical physics, especially in areas overlapping the traditional subfields, in ways that are not easily realized in existing institutions," said Lwin.

As a participant, Lwin will also spend a day of training at Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) Network to assist in research-based learning activities in the classroom.

Lwin, who retired from Western in July 2006 after 41 years of service, is originally from Burma (also called Myanmar). He came to the United States in 1955 to study physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a government scholar. In 1965, he joined the WIU physics department. He has also worked for the Solid State Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory as a resident research scientist, as a visiting physics professor at the University of Illinois and as a visiting scholar in China at the invitation of the Chinese government. His main research interests are condensed matter physics, the point imperfections and radiation damage in solids. Other areas of interests include physics education and computer applications in physics.

Posted By: Alisha Looney (AA-Looney@wiu.edu)
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