Shina Tan has been awarded the 2010 George E. Valley Prize by the American Physical Society “For the exact relations he derived for Strongly Interacting Fermi gases with large scattering length, which are found to be of fundamental importance in cold atom physics.”
He joined the School of Physics of the Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in August of 2010. Tan's major research interests to date have been the general quantum many-body problem and the few-body physics of ultracold atoms and molecules. By inventing a new set of generalized functions, Tan solved the equivalent of the ultraviolet divergence problem for the strongly interacting Fermi gas with large scattering length and derived a set of exact relations for the energy, momentum distribution, and pair correlation function. The latter are now called the "Tan relations". His results demonstrated that the behavior of the momentum distribution far away from the Fermi surface plays an essential role. Prof. Tan's research has significantly impacted both experimental and theoretical research in the field of cold atoms.
