Shoucheng Zhang (Chinese: 张首晟; February 15, 1963 – December 1, 2018) was a Chinese-American physicist who was the JG Jackson and CJ Wood professor of physics at Stanford University.
At Stony Brook, he initially studied supergravity (and earned his Ph.D. in 1987) with his advisor Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, before turning to condensed matter on the advice of his personal hero, Nobel laureate Chen-Ning Yang.
In 2007, the "quantum spin Hall effect" discovered by Zhang was named one of the "Top Ten Important Scientific Breakthroughs in the World" by Science Magazine.
[2] Danhua Capital's major investors include state-owned Beijing government enterprise Zhongguancun Development Group (ZDG), which has been linked to the Chinese technology transfer program Made in China 2025.
He generalized the theory of fractional quantum Hall effect to higher dimensions and related it to fundamental particle physics.
[15] In early 2000, Zhang and collaborators revitalized the field of spintronics by proposing an intrinsic spin Hall effect and relating it to geometrical phases in quantum mechanics.
This proposal stimulated extensive theoretical and experimental work, and also contributed to later developments concerning the quantum spin Hall effect and topological insulators more generally.
Between the years 2010–2015, Zhang and his group of physicists at Stanford University wrote three theoretical papers where they successfully showed how to test Ettore Majorana's theory of Majorana fermion, or what had previously been only a scientific hypothesis that a particle can be its own antiparticle, without the need of external forces having the same mass with the opposite charge of the electron.