Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
After mid-October, the weather in Jin Ling started to grow colder as the days passed by. Although winter hadn’t arrived yet, it was just as cold.
In an office in the physics department at Jin Ling University, a strand of steam was floating on top of a vacuum flask.
Professor Li Rongen sat in front of his office desk drinking tea while he browsed through the conference information on his computer.
It would soon be the annual MRS Autumn Conference, and all the reports and theses that were to be presented at the conference had been released.
Regardless of whether or not one had time to attend this conference, anyone in the materials science would pay attention to a top-level conference like this.
Looking at the trend of thesis submission, there had been a growth in graphene research this year.
Among them, the most eye-catching was undoubtedly the study on graphene as a superconducting material.
101K!
This number caused a sensation in the materials science community.
Even though this thesis was posted on the official website after the deadline, according to the website rankings, it was one of the top three downloaded theses.
Li Rongen wasn’t in the field of superconducting materials. He had a very shallow understanding of graphene as most of his research was centered around carbon nanotubes. However, this didn’t prevent him from reading the thesis and understanding its finesse.
Professor Li Rongen read the thesis in its entirety before he put the thesis down. He couldn’t help but exclaim, “Amazing.”
Graphene superconductivity.
A few years ago, this concept was a distant dream. I didn’t expect that in a few short years, this concept would go from the theoretical realm to the applied realm.
Not just that, but according to the thesis, 101K isn’t even the limit of the superconductivity transition temperature.
Theoretically, as long as the concentration of charge carriers in the graphene increases, the temperature could also increase… Of course, even though this sounds easy, it definitely isn’t easy to do.
Regardless, any researchers in the field of copper oxide superconductivity would probably start to have doubts about their life, right?
After all, they spent half a century to raise the critical superconductivity temperature to 125K. Then graphene came and blew copper oxide out of the water in terms of plasticity and engineering possibilities.
It seems that Professor Lu isn’t satisfied with lithium batteries anymore.
First, batteries. Then, superconductivity, what’s next?
Professor Li Rongen was only curious about one thing; what would this guy do next?
It seemed that Lu Zhou could conquer any research field he set his mind to.
Li Rongen wasn’t the only one reading this report. His PhD and master’s students who were next to him was reading it as well.
A PhD student named Zhang Fan heard his professor’s exclaim. He couldn’t contain the curiosity in his heart anymore, so he asked respectfully, “Professor, when you were doing experiments with God Lu, what kind of person was he?”
Professor Li Rongen heard this question and smiled.
“What kind of person? I don’t know how to describe him other than he’s a genius.”
Professor Li Rongen began to think back to the past and continued to speak, “I won’t tell you guys about his mathematical modeling competition results as you have probably heard of it already. In his second year, he built a mathematical model using experimental data provided by us, and he estimated the mechanical properties of the material based on the data collected by the Fourier infrared spectrometer. I’ll leave it to your imagination to think about the level of technical skills required to do that.”
It wasn’t just Zhang Fan, the other two graduate students in the room also looked astonished.
Being able to do computational materials was nothing impressive as many materials science experiments would often use the first principle calculations. This was especially so after Lu Zhou’s influence. Even people that weren’t in the computational materials field would learn a bit about computational materials.
However, being able to do all this as a second-year student was frightening.
As for the Higher Education Society Cup…
For people like them, they’d be lucky to win a second-level national prize.
Zhang Fan couldn’t help but think about what he was doing during his second year.
After a while, all he could remember was his ex-girlfriend’s name.
Professor Li Rongen seemed to have guessed what his students were thinking when he smiled and shook his head.
“Don’t be jealous. He’s a mathematical genius. Soon after he won the Higher Education Society Cup, he solved a world-famous mathematics problem… It’s called the Zhou guess or something. You guys haven’t met him, so you don’t know how strong his mathematical intuition is. Simply put, if I give you guys some data, it’d be a blessing if you could make me some graphs. However, Lu Zhou can make the data come to life.”
The students looked at each other with confusion.
They obviously didn’t know what Professor Li Rongen meant by making data come to life.
Zhao Qing, who had kept quiet this whole time, finished reading the thesis. He looked up from the computer screen.
“Professor, why do you think Professor Lu is researching superconducting materials? Does it have market application potential?”
Li Rongen: “It’s not necessarily that he’s researching this for market application, but if you want to know about the future potential, it’s application prospects are much larger than you think.”
Zhao Qing was stunned. He then asked, “Is the superconducting materials market that big?”
Professor Li Rongen shook his head and said, “It’s more than just superconductivity.”
Zhang Fan was also stunned. “It’s not just superconductivity?”
“Read the thesis again if you don’t understand. The existence of the Mott insulator means the graphene can be ‘opened’ and ‘closed’. What does this mean? Do I really need to explain it?”
Zhao Qing said: “… Semiconductor?”
Professor Li Rongen nodded with approval and said, “Correct.”
Due to graphene’s high charge carrier mobility, it had a broad application when used in electronic transistors.
Also, everyone knew that graphene had no bandwidth, which meant that the graphene electronic devices would remain highly conductive at any voltage and could not be completely turned off, thereby limiting their use in electronics.
However, the magic of the Mott insulator was that it added a voltage gate to the material which allowed the graphene superlattice electrons to rapidly pass through like there was no resistance.
Obviously, this created an “opening” and “closed” state.
If one only wanted to utilize this property of the Mott insulator, one didn’t need to achieve the superconductivity temperature of 101K.
Therefore, this thesis wasn’t only significant in the superconductivity industry, it also opened up a door to graphene semiconductors.
Not only would the energy industry be interested, but major electronics manufacturers would also pay attention to this area of research at the MRS conference.
After all, graphene was sold by the gram. Thus, to use it to transmit power was too expensive. However, it could be used in electronics.
Suddenly, the taskbar below the browser flashed.
When Professor Li Rongen saw the email notification, he opened his email.
He was stunned when he saw this email, but a gleeful smirk gradually appeared on his face.
“This kid didn’t forget me.”
It was the invitation to the Nobel Prize award ceremony.
He originally planned to watch it on TV, and he didn’t expect to have the opportunity to see it in person…
