Nai Phuan Ong (born 10 September 1948 in Penang, Malaysia) is an American experimental physicist, specializing in "condensed matter physics focusing on topological insulators, Dirac/Weyl semimetals, superconductors and quantum spin liquids.
[2] As a youth, he attended Saint Xaviers Institution, run by the Christian Brothers, where classes were taught in English.
He started building toy airplanes and copying drawings of turbine blades and pistons in jet engines.
[9][10] In recent years, Ong has done research on Dirac and Weyl semimetals, the thermal Hall effect, and topological superconductors.
In several frustrated quantum magnets, Ong’s group has found that spin excitations produce a large thermal Hall current despite being strictly charge-neutral.