Professor Chen Ping Yang's early significant contributions to mathematical physics

Abstract

In the 60s Professor Chen Ping Yang with Professor Chen Ning Yang published several seminal papers on the study of Bethe’s hypothesis for various problems of physics. The works on the lattice gas model, critical behavior in liquid–gas transition, the one-dimensional (1D) Heisenberg spin chain, and the thermodynamics of 1D delta-function interacting bosons are significantly important and influential in the fields of mathematical physics and statistical mechanics. In particular, the work on the 1D Heisenberg spin chain led to subsequent developments in many problems using Bethe’s hypothesis. The method which Yang and Yang proposed to treat the thermodynamics of the 1D system of bosons with a delta-function interaction leads to significant applications in a wide range of problems in quantum statistical mechanics. The Yang and Yang thermodynamics has found beautiful experimental verifications in recent years.