Brief Vita

• Assistant Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2025–Present)
• Visiting Assistant Professor, Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, Michigan State University (2022–2025)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Bonn University, Germany (2018–2022)
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China (2016–2018)
• PhD, Physics, University of Massachusetts Amherst (2016)
• MPhil, Physics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2010)
• BSc, Physics, Tsinghua University, China (2008)

Selected Honors

• FRIB Theory Fellowship
• Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers
• Emanuel R. Piore Award, Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  

Research Areas

My research lies at the intersection of the strong and the electroweak sector of the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. I focus on precise theoretical calculations of non-perturbative effects that are crucial for interpreting various low-energy experiments involving hadronic and nuclear systems. These systems serve as “precision laboratories” for testing fundamental symmetries within the SM and for probing potential new physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM). My work spans a wide range of low-energy processes, including neutron and nuclear beta decays, lepton-nucleus scattering, searches for permanent electric dipole moments (EDMs), and hadronic parity violation (HPV), among others. A recent focus of mine is to perform high-precision calculations of SM theoretical inputs in hadronic and nuclear beta decays, with the aim of clarifying the observed anomalies in the determination of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix elements V_ud​ and V_us​. These anomalies currently represent one of the most promising avenues for uncovering BSM physics.

Selected Publications

• Unique forbidden beta decays at zero momentum transfer, Chien-Yeah Seng, Ayala Glick-Magid and Vincenzo Cirigliano, Phys.Rev.Lett 134 (2025) 081805
• Superallowed nuclear beta decays and precision tests of the Standard Model, Mikhail Gorchtein and Chien-Yeah Seng, Ann.Rev.Nucl.Part.Sci. 74 (2024) 23-47
• Dispersive formalism for the nuclear structure correction δNS to the β decay rate, Chien-Yeah Seng and Mikhail Gorchtein, Phys.Rev.C 107 (2023) 035503
• Model-independent determination of nuclear weak form factors and implications for Standard Model precision tests, Chien-Yeah Seng, Phys.Rev.Lett 130 (2023) 152501
• Update on |Vus| and |Vus/Vud| from semileptonic kaon and pion decays, Chien-Yeah Seng, Daniel Galviz, William J. Marciano and Ulf-G. Meißner, Phys. Rev. D105 (2022), 013005
• Radiative corrections to semileptonic beta decays: Progress and challenges, Chien-Yeah Seng, Particles, 4 (2021) 397
• Joint lattice QCD-dispersion theory analysis confirms the quark-mixing top-row unitarity deficit, Chien-Yeah Seng, Xu Feng, Mikhail Gorchtein and Lu-Chang Jin, Phys. Rev. D101 (2020), 111301
• Dispersive Evaluation of the Inner Radiative Correction in Neutron and Nuclear β-decay, Chien-Yeah Seng, Mikhail Gorchtein and Michael J. Ramsey-Musolf, Phys.Rev. D100 (2019) 013001
• Reduced Hadronic Uncertainty in the Determination of Vud, Chien-Yeah Seng, Mikhail Gorchtein, Hiren H. Patel and Michael J. Ramsey-Musolf, Phys.Rev.Lett 121 (2018) 241804
• Reexamination of the standard model nucleon electric dipole moment, Chien-Yeah Seng, Phys.Rev. C91 (2015) 025502

A complete list of publications is available here:

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