Ever since the establishment of the Jinling Institute for Advanced Study, the experimental facilities have been gradually improved. Because of the relaxed academic atmosphere and funding, the institute successfully attracted a large number of overseas talents.
The Institute for Advanced Study used to be a small private institute with four major institutes, namely mathematics, physics, computational materials, and information science. Because of the fresh talents, it gradually evolved into a large institute, with a large range of subjects.
After the second and third phase of the research institute was completed, teams inside the institutes branched off from their former institute and formed their own research institutes.
For example, the Institute of Biochemistry used to be part of the Institute of Computational Materials.
After Lu Zhou gave Yang Xu the fabric sample, he brought the two test tubes to the composition analysis laboratory at the Institute of Biochemistry. He found the person in charge, which was Xu Wenhao.
“Professor Lu? Oh, come on in, I’ll get some drinks from… What do you want? We have…”
“No, it’s fine,” Lu Zhou said as he looked at how excited Xu Wenhao was. Lu Zhou smiled awkwardly and said, “I have some test tubes that I need you to do some component analyses on. I hope I’m not disturbing your work.”
Xu Wenhao shook his head and said, “No no, I just finished my experiment. If you have any samples you want me to measure, just tell me!”
For a noob researcher like him, he felt honored that he was able to help a Nobel Prize winner.
Not to mention that any thesis with Lu Zhou’s name on it would be blessed!
Lu Zhou felt like this guy was a bit overenthusiastic, but he didn’t take it too seriously.
Lu Zhou happened to notice some samples placed on the experiment table, and he raised his eyebrows.
“What is this?”
Xu Wenhao looked at the samples and immediately knew what Lu Zhou was talking about. He smiled and replied, “Oh, these are some carbon-based chip samples sent from the Institute of Computational Materials. They asked me to do a component analysis, so I was just fiddling with it.”
Carbon-based chips?
There was suddenly a tinge of surprise on Lu Zhou’s face.
It has already been two years, he nearly forgot about this project.
He still remembered that shortly after he left America, the Jinling Institute of Computational Materials cooperated with Baosheng Group and developed the SG-1 superconducting material by improving the graphene overlap angle.
Last year at the conference in California, Baosheng Group demonstrated the superconducting technology at the controllable fusion summit. This surprised many foreign fusion research companies, and Baosheng Group received countless orders.
Before Lu Zhou left America, he told the boss of Baosheng Group that silicon-based chip research was entering a bottleneck. Even though Intel and Qualcomm were still continuously improving their silicon chip technology, they were still limited by the laws of silicon physics. If China wanted to overtake the computer chip field, they had to find another material to replace silicon.
Graphene semiconductor was one of the possible materials.
Graphene had almost all of the characteristics required for electronics. Its only flaw was finding a suitable energy band gap. However, the energy band gap could be adjusted by changing the graphene overlap angle.
Even though the boss of Baosheng Group promised to begin research on graphene chips, he never got around to it.
However, Lu Zhou didn’t blame him too much. After all, the Baosheng Group boss only wanted to focus on the SG-1 material and get a promotion.
Not to mention that graphene semiconductors research had only just begun. It might take years or decades before the maturity of graphene chip technology. Even if Baosheng group spent a bunch of money on researching the technology, they might not receive any profits.
Therefore, the Jinling Institute for Advanced Study was the one that worked on this project.
This project was partly funded by the state scientific research funds, and the rest was funded by Star Sky Technology.
After all, if they wanted to have a patent on the technology, they had to put some skin in the game.
Lu Zhou was intrigued, so he asked, “How is the project going?”
Xu Wenhao scratched his head awkwardly and said, “I’m not sure about their progress, but I heard Professor Yang’s team has developed a method for preparing graphene semiconductors. But the synthesis is still not stable… I’ve heard Professor Yang complain several times, that if you were to help him, this problem would have been solved a long time ago.”
Lu Zhou coughed.
“What do you mean a long time ago… I’m not a god, what am I supposed to do…”
Xu Wenhao quickly said, “I didn’t say that, Professor Yang said it.”
“Okay, whatever.” Lu Zhou shook his head and took out two test tubes from his pocket. He placed it on the empty test tube rack on the experiment table and said, “I have two samples here, I need you to do component analyses on them.”
One of the test tubes contained a sample of the liquid meal-replacement.
After Lu Zhou took the liquid out of the system space, he drank half of it and felt like it tasted pretty good. It tasted like a mixture of yogurt and lemonade, but it was thicker than lemonade.
Of course, the taste wasn’t important. The important part was that after drinking half of the bottle, he was totally satiated.
Lu Zhou was curious about the nutritional content, so he placed the remaining liquid in a sample test tube.
If he could figure out the formula of this liquid, it could be used for food in space.
The other test tube was obviously the remains of the can of Future coke.
In the past, Lu Zhou didn’t have the means to test this stuff, but now, he finally could. He obviously would never pass up on an opportunity to experiment. Every time he drank the coke, he felt refreshed and energized. The ingredients might be interesting…
Of course, maybe he was just overthinking.
For example, maybe the manufacturer just added some extra taurine and caffeine…
Xu Wenhao looked at the two test tubes and smiled.
“No problem, when do you need it?”
“As soon as you can. Send the report and the remaining samples to my office…”
The phone in Lu Zhou’s pocket suddenly began to ring.
“Let me take this.”
Xu Wenhao immediately started to kiss a*s as he said, “No worries, go ahead, I’ll start testing right away!”
Lu Zhou nodded and replied, “Okay then, thanks!”
Lu Zhou turned around and left the laboratory. He picked up the call as he walked toward the end of the hallway.
“Hello?”
He heard Director Li’s voice through the phone.
“It’s me, how have you been?”
Lu Zhou could tell from his voice that Director Li was in a good mood. Clearly, the successful moon landing was a huge accomplishment for the State Administration for National Defense and the China National Space Administration.
But Lu Zhou didn’t really care, so he smiled and replied, “I’m good, what’s up?”
“Do you have time to come to Beijing?”
Lu Zhou: “Beijing? Why?”
“Why?” Director Li smiled and said, “To give you an award, why else?”
