LIAO Keng-Yi (Henry) Interviews with students in the international program in the School of Advanced Science and Engineering

I’m from Taiwan, and basically, the reason I came here as an undergrad student is that at my high school, there was a recommendation process that allowed us to apply here directly without any other examination. Waseda is quite a well-known school in Taiwan — among Japanese universities, it’s one of the most famous, after the University of Tokyo.

And I wanted to challenge myself, get away from what I’m familiar with, so I thought, “Well, I have this chance, why not take it?” And here I am.

I’m in theoretical physics. Currently, because in fourth year physics you’re usually assigned to a research lab, I’m working in Hiroyuki Abe’s High Energy Physics lab.

The specific topic I’m researching right now is an area called supergravity, a theory after applying a gauge principle to supersymmetric Standard Model.

Basically, all physicists work with a theory known as the Standard Model, which describes three of the four known fundamental forces (electromagnetism and the weak and strong interactions). This theory is well constructed and understood, and allows us to explain most of the experiments at the electroweak scale. But it doesn’t include gravity, which is necessary to describe the motion of planets, for example.

For gravity we need to adjust things at higher energy scales, so we need to include more information to advance the theory. We want to not only describe the world around us (that’s basically the low-energy scale), but also to extend that notion to higher energy scales, which we will need to introduce gravity into the Standard Model.
This is actually very hard to do. One way is to introduce a kind of symmetry into our theory. The “super” in supergravity refers to supersymmetry, this kind of symmetry we introduced. From there we modify, or gauge, the symmetry of it, which allows us to introduce gravity, the missing interaction in the Standard Model, into the full theory.

And then, after all these processes, we get supergravity.

There are really not many restrictions on the courses you can take at Waseda. So I not only study physics, which is required, but also math and computer science. Sort of as my hobbies.

These have actually helped me in my research, because in most cases it’s quite hard to do experiments in high energy physics. So usually what we can do is use existing data, and do numerical analysis on a computer.

The atmosphere here pushes us to become more active in our studies. I helped form a group, a study group, in the department of physics. It’s a place for all students in the physics department to talk about whatever they’re interested in, and help give the freshmen some basic knowledge, up to a certain level, so they can discuss various topics among themselves.

Well, I’ll do my Ph.D. Probably that will be in the U.S., because the graduate schools they have there in physics really train you from the basics at a more rigorous level, from bottom to top. I think that would be good training for me, if I want to continue in theoretical physics.