Meet Can-Ming Hu, the 2024 Dr. John M. Bowman Memorial Winnipeg Rh Award winner

Dr. Can-Ming Hu is a distinguished professor of Physics and Astronomy at the UM Faculty of Science. As a researcher of fundamental science, his work informs the future design of the smart devices we depend on every day.

Hu is the recipient of the 2024 Dr. John M. Bowman Memorial Winnipeg Rh Institute Foundation Award in recognition of his advancements in quantum material interactions, helping shape the next generation of communication technology. Hu is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Lead Member of the UM Dynamic Spintronics Group.

UM Today caught up with him recently to learn more about his research.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your research.

I began my studies as a physicist in China, then trained in Germany and worked in Japan before coming to the University of Manitoba 20 years ago. This was during the honeymoon period of globalization and at that time governments were working together to support scientific exchange and collaboration.

My research in condensed matter physics studies how light and matter interact. More precisely, I look at how energy and information pass between materials and electrical magnetic fields.

Throughout my career I’ve been lucky to have great mentors and now I work to pay that forward here at UM.

Why is this research important?

We use electromagnetic waves to communicate, such as with a video call, where we are not actually seeing each other but a visualization of the information exchanged between our devices. When we store videos on our devices, the physics of light matter interaction sets the limit for storage amounts and loading speed.

In this way, all communication technologies are developed based on our understanding of physics interactions between different materials. We physicists have the job of pushing these physical limits so that engineers can make better devices.

Where I did my PhD studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany, x-rays had been discovered by professor Wilham Roentgen in 1895, for which he received the first physics Nobel Prize.

I was recruited to Würzburg in 1992 by the late professor Gottfried Landwehr. He was a pioneer working on developing semiconductors that emitted blue light for use with compact discs. At that time, CDs used red light which has relatively large wavelengths which limited capacity and resolution.

Blue light has a shorter wavelength allowing us to make a higher density DVD and in fact a few years later that frontier of fundamental research led to the invention of the blue LED by a Japanese scientist, Shuji Nakamura, who also received a Nobel prize.

Now today, CDs are out and nobody uses DVDs anymore, but the LED that Nakamura invented is still used everywhere in low energy light bulbs.

I train my students to push the limits of physics so that engineers can have more powerful tools to build useful devices. That process normally takes a long time, but fundamentally the frontier of this knowledge is explored by chemists, computer scientists and physicists like me.

What does the Rh Award mean to you?

I’m tremendously grateful and humbled by this award. It means a lot, particularly because fundamental research and basic sciences don’t always have immediate impacts and can often be difficult to explain.

I hope this award will bring greater public awareness to the importance of fundamental sciences. It’s also an opportunity for me to acknowledge my team members, collaborators, and the many colleagues in the Faculty of Science who are doing important basic research that will someday have important and long-lasting impacts.

What do you hope to achieve in the future?

I plan to explore the so-called quantum physics of light matter interaction with the goal of inventing a device that can emit microwaves at room temperature in a quantum mechanical way. I’ll explain what that means using an example.

Today anyone can easily buy a quantum mechanical light source, called a laser diode or laser pointer like you might have at home to play with your cat. But even though anyone can buy a laser, nobody can buy a microwave laser, which we call a maser.

A maser operating at room temperature would function something like the laser but the emitted microwaves can pass through walls. Cell phone calls use microwaves for transmitting information, but classical physics still sets the limit because we have not yet discovered some quantum physics principles explaining how microwaves interact with materials.

That is what I want to do. In fact, since 2015 my group has been working on that question, and we have recently published some of our preliminary results.

This future breakthrough would allow us to produce a better kind of wi-fi network that would be more reliable over a much larger area with fewer towers. This could be especially important for the many rural and isolated communities across Northern Canada who can’t access wi-fi today.

What about you people would find surprising?

I actually spend more time reading novels than I do reading physics papers in my daily life. In fact, I see many links between literature and fundamental science.

One of my favorites novels is Hemingway’s the Old Man and the Sea, I’ve read it many times and each time it touches me deeply how the human will struggles with the power of nature. It’s a very complex theme examined by many novelists, but Hemingway reduces that to one old man and a big fish.

As a physicist I also look at the overwhelming complexity of nature, energy and light with the goal of reducing it to the simplest, purest level. I often feel like that old man, except for me the big fish it is a tiny electron whose secrets I’m struggling to reveal.

If I couldn’t be a physicist in the next life, I would want to be a novelist.

Any advice for early-career researchers and students?

Just one word, read.

Even if you’re not studying to be a physicist you should read physics anyway. It gives us a powerful way of thinking and understanding the phenomena that surround us.

Read broadly because the sciences and arts are deeply connected, and therefore a masterpiece of one field inspires deep insight into the other.

Davide Montebruno