N. Phuan Ong

Nai Phuan Ong is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University and a former Director of the Princeton Center for Complex Materials serving from 2008 to 2014. He received his undergraduate education at Columbia University and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1976. His research interests include topological matter (topological insulators and Dirac-Weyl semimetals), superconductivity, quantum magnetism, candidate spin liquids, and quantum shot-noise phenomena in 2D materials. With Pierre Monceau, Ong found the first example of a metal that exhibits sliding charge-density-wave conduction, NbSe₃. In high-Tc superconductors, Ong’s group -- using the Nernst effect and torque magnetometry -- established the existence of strong fluctuations of the order parameter engendered by the vortex liquid. In a series of experiments on a variety of ferromagnets, Ong clarified the central role played by the Berry curvature in the anomalous Hall effect ubiquitous in magnetic materials. With Bob Cava, Ong and students have also made a number of fundamental contributions to the nascent field of topological materials. They uncovered the two Dirac-Weyl semimetals Na₃Bi and GdPtBi known to exhibit the chiral anomaly (the ultralow-energy analog of the Adler-Bell-Jackiw anomaly in the decay of neutral pions). They also found the first example of a superconductor, MoTe₂, that hosts a distinctive edge supercurrent co-existing with bulk superconductivity. Ong has received numerous honors, including an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship in 1982 and the H. Kamerlingh Onnes Prize in 2006. He has co-authored two patents, for “Flux Method for producing crystals of YBa₂Cu₃O₇,” and for “Electronic interconnects and devices with topological surface states and methods for fabricating same.” He is a member of the American Physical Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and U.S. National Academy of Sciences.