A major country that helps build a highland of scientific and technological innovation

Source: People's Daily

Figure (1): Panorama of "Chinese Heavenly Eye".

Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Ou Dongqu

Figure (2): Shanghai light source.

Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Ding Ting

Draft: Zhao Kairu

At present, a new round of scientific and technological revolution is surging forward, full of opportunities and challenges. "If a worker desires to do good, he must first use it." The country's major scientific and technological infrastructure, known as the "big scientific device", is precisely the weapon to promote major scientific and technological innovation. Facilities such as "China's Sky Eye", China's spallation neutron source, Oriental Super Ring, And Shanghai Light Source have become well-known scientific and technological "stars" and the country's heavy weapons.

The country's major scientific and technological infrastructure originated in the 1940s, although the history is not long, but it has made outstanding contributions to human scientific and technological innovation. After the reform and opening up, the Beijing positron-negative electron collider is an important milestone, marking that the country's major scientific and technological infrastructure has entered a period of growth. After the 1990s, under the guidance of the strategy of rejuvenating the country through science and education, the relevant departments approved projects to support the start-up construction of a number of facilities. Since the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, under the guidance of relevant planning, the country's major scientific and technological infrastructure has achieved a new leap in scope, quantity and quality, ushering in a period of rapid development.

Create extreme research conditions to make scientific exploration and scientific and technological innovation go further

National major scientific and technological infrastructure refers to a large-scale complex scientific research device or system that is open and shared by the state in order to enhance the ability to explore the unknown world, discover natural laws, and achieve scientific and technological change, and is a national public facility with greater international influence that provides long-term operation services for high-level research activities. Why is there a major national scientific and technological infrastructure? This should return to the law of scientific exploration, the country's major scientific and technological infrastructure is like the key to open the unknown field, can create higher energy, greater density, higher intensity and other extreme research conditions, to help researchers complete relevant experiments, obtain new discoveries. For example, although telescopes are more common, in order to reveal the mysteries of the depths of the universe, telescopes are getting bigger and bigger, more and more complex, and large telescopes with the overall layout of the whole country have become major national scientific and technological infrastructure. In order to explore the laws of the microscopic world, people invented the particle accelerator, which is based on the synchrotron radiation light source and spallation neutron source, which has become a super microscope for insight into the complex microscopic world and a major national scientific and technological infrastructure.

According to the use, the country's major scientific and technological infrastructure is divided into three categories: special facilities, public facilities and public welfare facilities.

Dedicated facilities are built to achieve major scientific and technological goals in specific disciplines, aiming at the international frontier, with clear and specific uses and fixed user groups. Relying on dedicated facilities, researchers can achieve breakthroughs in the frontier direction. For example, the Neutrino Experiment Station. Neutrinos are wonderful particles that connect the microscopic world with the macroscopic universe and are extremely difficult to capture in nature. Changes in its basic parameters affect the composition of the entire edifice of the material world, and the neutrino mixing angle θ13 is one such parameter. The Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment Station, which has completed its mission, is located in a cave, and the experiment hall uses rocks to shield the background of cosmic rays to interfere with the experimental results, and the neutrino detector sits quietly in the dark blue ultrapure water pool, with its eyes wide open and staring at the neutrinos from the nuclear reactor. In 2012, the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment Station discovered a third neutrino oscillation pattern and accurately measured the oscillation probability proportional to the sine square of the θ13 angle. This is a landmark discovery in neutrino physics and was selected as one of The Science's Top Ten Scientific Breakthroughs of 2012. The next-generation neutrino experiment station in Jiangmen, Guangdong Province, is under construction, which will use a 20,000-ton liquid scintillation detector to accurately measure the energy spectrum of neutrinos in the reactor to infer the mass order of neutrinos, which is a hot spot in international scientific and technological competition. Similar special facilities include the Oriental Super ring that studies high-temperature fusion plasma under magnetic constraints, the "Chinese Celestial Eye" that studies the structure of celestial bodies and the origin and evolution of the universe in the radio band, and the high-altitude cosmic ray observatory that studies the origin of high-energy cosmic rays and related cosmic evolution.

Utilities underpin scientific research in many fields. The utility provides an experimental platform and testing means for a large number of users in a non-specific field to meet the needs of users and provide comprehensive and complete services. China spallation neutron source, Shanghai light source, strong magnetic field experimental device, etc. are all public facilities. The China Spallation Neutron Source, located in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, has effectively promoted the progress of material science and energy science in the mainland. Neutrons are not charged, strong penetration, is the ideal tool for metal materials to do "chest X-ray", understand the engine blade material, you need such a tool. Using this facility, researchers can do "chest X-ray" for various engine blades of different production processes, and simulate different service conditions to obtain their internal stress data, providing an important basis for the material design and manufacturing process of domestic blades. Shanghai light source belongs to the medium energy synchrotron radiation source, and its completion marks that the mainland has entered the world's advanced synchrotron radiation source "club". Relying on the Shanghai light source, the mainland has made a series of achievements in physics, chemistry, life science, materials science and even archaeology: successfully discovered the "ghost particle" in condensed matter - Weyl fermions, resolved the three-dimensional crystal structure of the human glucose transporter GLUT1, and helped the research and development of new anti-cancer drugs... As a follow-up to the facility, the Shanghai Light Source Line Station project is about to be completed, and the hard X-ray free electron laser device in Zhangjiang, Shanghai and the high-energy synchrotron radiation light source in Huairou, Beijing are under construction.

Public welfare facilities mainly provide basic data, germplasm resources and information services for economic construction, national security and social development. Such facilities are the China Remote Sensing Satellite Ground Station, the Long and Short Wave Timing System, and the Wildlife Germplasm Resource Bank in Southwest China. After continuous expansion, China's remote sensing satellite ground station has built satellite receiving stations in Beijing, Xinjiang and other places, with real-time satellite data reception capabilities covering all the territory of the mainland and 70% of the land area of Asia. The satellite data it provides is widely used in resource survey, environmental monitoring, geological exploration, surveying and mapping, urban planning, water and fire pest disaster monitoring and evaluation in land, forestry, agriculture, water conservancy and other departments. After earthquakes, floods and mudslides, the management department evaluates the extent of the disaster and formulates a disaster relief plan through the comparison of pre- and post-disaster remote sensing data. In recent years, China's remote sensing satellite ground station has also successfully realized the data reception of satellites such as "Wukong", "Mozi" and "Huiyan", ensuring the high-level output of space science satellites.

Create new infrastructure in the field of science and technology to help achieve a high level of scientific and technological self-reliance and self-improvement

With the continuous acceleration of the construction of a scientific and technological power on the mainland, the layout and construction of major national scientific and technological infrastructure has been included in the scope of new infrastructure. More and more facilities are facing the forefront of science and technology in the world, facing the main battlefield of the economy, facing the major needs of the country, and facing the life and health of the people, and have become an indispensable force in the field of science and technology.

Facing the forefront of science and technology in the world, the country's major scientific and technological infrastructure plays a role as a source. Basic research is the source of the entire scientific system, and many facilities have made great contributions to this. The high-altitude cosmic ray observatory records the highest energy photons observed by humans, breaking through the traditional understanding of particle acceleration in the Milky Way and opening a new window in ultra-high-energy gamma astronomy. Faced with the frontier problem of the origin of fast radio bursts in the field of astrophysics, mainland researchers have used the "Wise Eye" satellite to accurately locate the X-ray objects corresponding to fast radio bursts, and also used the "Chinese Sky Eye" to capture the diversified polarization information of fast radio bursts for the first time, revealing their source and radiation mechanism. The Oriental Super ring achieves a long pulse of 1056 seconds of high-parameter plasma operation, which is currently the longest time in the world for high-temperature plasma operation in tokamak devices. The series of innovative achievements achieved by the device provide an important experimental basis for the independent construction of fusion engineering experimental reactors.

Facing the main economic battlefield and people's life and health, the country's major scientific and technological infrastructure is a new engine for the development of high-tech industries. For example, in the medical field, heavy ion research facilities have shown their skills. After heavy ions enter the human body, they have a wonderful function - staying at a certain depth according to the energy of heavy ions. Scientists envision that using this property could kill cancer cells in the body with little harm to normal cells. Relying on the heavy ion research facilities, the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has realized the commercial application of the carbon ion therapy system, a special heavy ion accelerator for cancer treatment in mainland China, breaking the monopoly of the high-end radiotherapy market in mainland China by foreign products, and becoming an important breakthrough in large-scale medical equipment in mainland China.

Facing the major needs of the country, the major national scientific and technological infrastructure has built an important platform to solve the needs. For example, in the process of fighting the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory detected the whole genome sequence of the new crown virus for the first time and isolated the virus strain for the first time, providing an important foundation for global scientists to carry out drug, vaccine and diagnostic research.

The country's major scientific and technological infrastructure has diverse forms and different functions, but each of them has its own magic and has become an important scientific and technological resource. In Beijing Huairou, Shanghai Zhangjiang, Anhui Hefei, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and other comprehensive national science centers, the construction and use of facilities is in full swing, and scientific researchers in various fields are using these sharp tools to create an innovative highland, striving for the construction of a scientific and technological power, and making unremitting efforts to achieve high-level scientific and technological self-reliance and self-reliance.

(The authors Wang Yifang and Peng Liangqiang are academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and researchers of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, respectively)

Recommended reading

Exploring the Cosmic "Invisible Man": Neutrino Experiments in Daya Bay Reactor: Edited by Wang Yifang; Published by Zhejiang Education Publishing House.

"Magical Light - Synchrotron Radiation": Xian Dingchang; Published by Hunan Education Publishing House.

The Eye of Heaven in China: A Biography of Nan Rendong by Wang Hongjia; Published by Beijing United Publishing Company.

People's Daily (2022-08-30, 20th edition)