Chao Tang

Who is Chao Tang?

Chao Tang is a Chinese physicist and professor at the University of California at San Francisco.

In 1987, as a post-doctoral research scientist in the Solid State Theory Group of Brookhaven National Laboratory, he and another fellow post-doctoral scientist, Kurt Wiesenfeld, along with their mentor, Per Bak, presented new ideas in group organization with a concept they coined self-organized criticality in their paper in Physical Review Letters. The first discovered example of a dynamical system displaying such self-organized criticality was named after them as the Bak-Tang-Wiesenfeld "sandpile" model.