Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
If lithium-sulfur batteries were like the nuclear fission of batteries, lithium-air batteries were like the nuclear fusion of batteries. The method of obtaining oxides from the outside air was the upper limit of the energy density of the lithium-anode battery.
Compared to traditional lithium-ion batteries, the energy density of lithium-sulfur batteries was an order of magnitude higher. Compared with lithium-sulfur batteries, lithium-air batteries were also an order of magnitude higher, in terms of energy density. Both the volume-energy density and mass-energy density were the same, a magnitude higher.
The only downside was that it probably wasn’t suitable for mobile phones or satellites.
After all, the reason why the energy density of lithium-air batteries was high was that its oxides weren’t integrated inside the battery, but were located outside the battery. Therefore, the battery needed to “breathe”.
Mobile phones were often kept in tight pockets and satellites were kept away from Earth’s atmosphere, making these devices difficult to take advantage of lithium-air batteries. However, for alternative energy vehicles or small drones, there wasn’t a better energy storage device than lithium-air batteries.
Because of this, lithium-air batteries were much more difficult to create than lithium-sulfur batteries.
Not only was there the lithium dendrite problem, which plagued all lithium anode batteries, but lithium-air batteries also had extremely demanding material requirements. After all, lithium itself was a super reactive metal. Exposing it to the atmosphere meant one would have to make it react only with the oxygen in the atmosphere.
Not to mention numerous other complex side effects.
The key to solving this problem was to find a thin film that could filter out water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other gases in the air and can accurately and quickly screen through oxygen molecules.
In fact, this technology was present in Debris No.1.
Unfortunately, the damage done to Debris No.1 was relatively large, and the layer of film was located on the surface of the debris. Even using the data collected with a scanner gun, there would still be a certain degree of difficulty to reverse engineer this technology.
Fortunately, Lu Zhou could rely on his intuition in the field of computing materials and his understanding of carbon-based materials to narrow down several technical routes that seemed more feasible. He then handed these technical routes to the researchers at the Institute of Computational Materials.
Since he was an academic leader, he didn’t need to work on every project himself. All he had to do was plan the research direction and find a reliable technical route.
If this technology succeeded, its impact would spread beyond the battery field.
From manufacturing to medical devices, a lot of fields would benefit from this technology.
The Alternative Energy Vehicle Summit in Jinling was held for a total of two days, during which Lu Zhou received a lot of business cards. Even though he rarely contacted people in the capital investment field, people in the field were extremely interested in him.
Whether it was because of the Ling Yun medal or because of Star Sky Technology’s research and development advantage, many people had exchanged business cards with him.
And no matter their intention, Lu Zhou responded politely to everyone who was interested in him.
Even though he didn’t need their help right now, who knew what the future could hold?
After all, not all projects could be funded by the state.
A week after the summit had ended, at the end of October…
Autumn was the perfect season for Lu Zhou to sit in his office and study mathematical problems. He unexpectedly received an email from Switzerland.
It was from Edward Witten.
In this email, in addition to his greetings, Witten walked about CERN’s latest research progress.
Especially regarding the “M particles”.
[In regards to the “M particles” you predicted in your thesis, an exploration project has been scheduled in this month’s experimental plan. If everything goes well, we will receive the results at the end of the month. We have held many meetings for this experiment, and we are all looking forward to seeing interesting things in the experiment.
[Finally, I hope you stay healthy and work hard. If there are any updates, I will tell you as soon as possible, even though I think CERN’s press releases are faster than my emails.
[Also, do you know about a kind of tofu that looks like cheese? I’m not sure if it’s a Jinling specialty, but putting that in bacon sandwiches is very delicious, I recommend you to try it. Unfortunately, I haven’t found it in any supermarkets here… Can you send me some if you can? I’ll pay you back of course. ? ]
The emoji at the end nearly made Lu Zhou spit out his coffee.
What the hell is chess-like tofu?
Is it fermented tofu?
Lu Zhou tapped on his keyboard and sent an email back.
[I think I know what you want.]
Lu Zhou clicked “Send” and closed the webpage. He was about to read a new thesis he just downloaded when his student Wu Shuimu walked in.
“Professor, are you going to eat at the cafeteria?”
“No, I have some documents to read… Oh yeah, if you can, bring me a bacon sandwich.”
“Bacon sandwich? Sure,” Wu Shuimu said as he nodded.
Lu Zhou said, “Also bring me a bottle of fermented tofu.”
Wu Shuimu: “…?”
Regardless, he had to follow the professor’s demands.
Wu Shuimu went to the supermarket and came back with a plastic bag.
“I brought you the sandwich… And the fermented tofu.”
“Thank you.”
Lu Zhou transferred Wu Shuimu some money for the food. Hesitantly, he spread some fermented tofu on the bacon sandwich and took a big bite.
The pungent, salty smell filled his nostrils. He leaned on his office chair and contemplated it for a bit. He looked at the tofu jar and threw it aside.
For f*ck’s sake!
It’s just salty as f*ck, how does this taste good at all?
…
The days quickly passed by, and it was soon the end of October.
Lu Zhou was preparing for the upcoming bidding conference for the moon landing project. He almost forgot about Witten’s email when he suddenly heard exploding news from CERN.
In CERN’s latest round of collision experiments, they tested the M particles predicted by Lu Zhou in his electrostrong interaction theory. Surprisingly, they were able to observe the existence of the particles from both the ATLAS and CMS detectors!
However, it was just a “signal”. The standard deviation was 2.5 and 2.7 sigma, so it was far from being classified as a “discovery”; however, it was still very exciting!
If this signal could be confirmed as a discovery, the physics community would finally find a piece of the puzzle that was outside of the standard model. The so-called “new physics”. People could finally give a clear explanation for things like the Yang-Mills existence and mass gap!
Also, this would become a major discovery, second only to the Higgs particle. It would be in the top ten greatest physics discoveries of the century!
Even if this century had only just begun…
Ever since this news was announced, it attracted a lot of attention from the international physics community.
The Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States jumped on the bandwagon and announced that they were preparing to repeat the experiment and check CERN experimental results. Other high-energy physics laboratories around the world had also started to prepare for the arrival of this new particle.
High-energy physics institutes weren’t the only ones that were ecstatic, the entire theoretical physics community was overjoyed at the possibility of a particle bridging the gap between the strong interaction and electromagnetic force.
Particle physics theses on arXiv reached a record high. Many PhD students were eager to use this potential discovery as their graduation thesis.
All of the physicists around the world were looking forward to this. The experiment at the Brookhaven National Laboratory was about to be carried out, and CERN’s second experiment was carried out as scheduled.
However, China wasn’t too excited about this news. The positron collider in Beijing didn’t have the capability to repeat high-energy particle experiments.
However, even though the Chinese physics community stayed relatively calm, the aerospace field was blossoming.
On the first Friday of November, all the way in Harbin, a bidding conference for the manned moon landing project was held as scheduled…
