CUHK scholars in the Department of Physics and the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering have received the China Top Cited Paper Awards by IOP Publishing for three research papers that are among the most influential articles from China. IOP Publishing selected the papers from across the entire IOP Publishing journal portfolio within the past three years (2019-21), recognising the top one per cent of most cited papers in different areas.

CUHK’s gravitational-wave team, led by Professor Otto Hannuksela, Research Assistant Professor, and Professor Tjonnie Li, Associate Professor from the Department of Physics, published the paper Search for Gravitational Lensing Signatures in LIGO-Virgo Binary Black Hole Events in Astrophysical Journal Letters in 2019, which received the award in the astronomy and astrophysics category. The work was a collaborative effort with multiple international institutes. It described the first comprehensive search for a phenomenon called “gravitational lensing” in gravitational-wave data published by the LIGO and Virgo Scientific Collaborations. The key feature of the work addresses the scientific debate regarding detection claims of gravitational-wave lensing. The team searched for a broad range of gravitational lensing signatures, and concluded that no signatures could be confidently detected in observations of gravitational wave run spanning 2015-19.

Professor Hannuksela said: “Since the paper’s publication, there has been significant push into more studies on gravitational lensing. It has given several early-career Hong Kong scientists a chance to contribute to a highly relevant topic on an international platform. This highly collaborative project was also one of the first works in gravitational-wave lensing. It’s great to see that the field is gaining traction within and outside the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaborations, while our team will continue to contribute to a newly formed gravitational lensing group within the LVK collaborations.”

In addition, a professor from the Department of Physics published the paper Sensitivity of parameter estimation near the exceptional point of a non-Hermitian system in New Journal of Physics in 2019. It received the award in the physics category.

The third award-winning paper, 4D printed tunable mechanical metamaterials with shape memory operations, was published by Professor Liao Wei-Hsin and former post-doctoral fellow Dr Mahdi Bodaghi from the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering in Smart Materials and Structures in 2019, and won in the materials category. It introduced tunable metamaterials with reversible thermo-mechanical memory operations developed using fused decomposition modelling (FDM).

Professor Liao said: “In recent years, additive manufacturing (or named 3D printing) technologies have enabled fabrication of mechanical metamaterials. While 3D printing of traditional materials produces static 3D mechanical metamaterials, four-dimensional (4D) printing of responsive materials adds the fourth dimension as it leads to adaptive metamaterials that, with an appropriate stimulus, change their shapes over time. In our study, we have developed a computational design tool, and printed and tested a mechanical metamaterial with memory operations. I am honoured to receive the award and recognition, and I hope this work can bring new inspiration and contribute to related research fields.”