SHANTOU, Dec. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- Chen Ning Yang, a 82-year-old Nobel Prize-winning physicist, married Weng Fan, a 28-year-old graduate student, Friday.

    The newlyweds obtained the marriage certificate at the foreign marriage registration division of the Shantou City Civil Affairs Bureau in south China's Guangdong Province in the company of their relatives.

    According to Chinese marriage registration rule, if the spouse of a mainland citizen is a resident of Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan oroverseas Chinese residing abroad, the newlyweds should register atthe marriage registration organ of the city where the mainland citizen lives.

    Weng, born in July 1976 in Chaozhou City, is a resident of Shantou. She is working on a masters degree in translation at the Guangzhou University of Foreign Studies. The couple flew from Beijing to Shantou Thursday.

    Yang is a Chinese-born American. He was born in Hefei, east China's Anhui Province, in 1922. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with his colleague Tsung Dao Lee in 1957 for their joint work in upsetting the principle of conservation of parity as a fundamental law of nuclear physics.

    Yang's former wife, Du Zhili, died of illness in October 2003. Two months later, Yang retired from his post in the United States and settled down at Beijing-based Tsinghua University, where he gave lectures on basic physics to freshmen and offered academic guidance to some postgraduates.

    Yang and Weng got to know each other in 1995 when Yang and his former wife attended an international physics conference held in Shantou. Weng was dispatched to receive the old couple as a freshman. Enditem