Hecheng, University of Science and Technology of China.
Hecity National Research Center for Microscopic Matter Science.
To outsiders, the name of this building, bearing a "national" designation, might not ring a bell.
But within the field, mentioning it elicits just one reaction: badass.
In 2003, the Ministry of Science and Technology officially approved the establishment of the "Hefei Microscopic Matter Science National Laboratory."
There were only five such national laboratories in the entire country at the time.
Physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, and information science.
Five major disciplines, all brought together under one roof.
Things like satellite-to-ground quantum key distribution, the world’s first single-molecule chemical bond imaging, and the "Jiuzhang" photonic quantum computing prototype.
All of them came from here.
Third floor, in the director’s office.
Wang Shen had just hung up the phone.
Wang Shen, in his early sixties, came from a background in STM.
As one of the founding disciples of scanning tunneling microscopy in Huaxia, he had a huge reputation in the field.
Outsiders might find terms like "polypeptide self-assembly" and "STM principles" utterly baffling.
But most people have probably heard of a few of the practical applications that came from his work.
For example, the nano-green printing plate technology. It completely eliminated the traditional photolithographic platemaking process, which required developing and fixing and produced tens of tons of chemical waste at a time.
The world’s first printing production line that used no photosensitive film and produced no rinsing waste liquid came from him.
His name is on eight ISO/IEC international standards.
Yet this was the titan who was now sitting there, his brow deeply furrowed.
On the sofa opposite him, a female academician was looking down, flipping through an issue of *Nature*.
Xie Yi.
Elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences at the age of 45, she was the youngest in that year’s selection.
In 2015, she received the UNESCO "For Women in Science Award," the first Chinese scientist to do so.
Her long-term research was in inorganic solid-state chemistry.
Her resume needed no further elaboration, as it was already written into the national energy strategy.
The two of them had been working together as a team in this office for several years.
Xie Yi looked up at Wang Shen and asked.
"What did Sister Zhang say?"
"What else could she say? She said the person we found is fine."
Wang Shen replied casually.
Hearing this, Xie Yi’s hand, which was turning a page of *Nature*, froze in mid-air.
She gave a helpless, bitter smile.
"Director Wang, what we did... it was a bit underhanded."
Wang Shen remained silent.
’How could he not know it was underhanded?’
But the project had been hopelessly stuck for several years.
They had money.
The two hundred million in special funding allocated from above was just sitting in the account, practically collecting cobwebs.
But they had no people.
They couldn’t bring themselves to ask their close contacts. How could they have the nerve to ask someone to come fill the pit of a project that several academicians couldn’t even budge?
As for those they weren’t as close with, the moment they heard it was a topic unlikely to ever get off the ground, they’d turn and walk away.
That was why last month, they had asked Mrs. Zhang Lufang to inquire at Yan University to see if there were any young mathematicians.
The requirements weren’t high: just someone competent enough who was willing to come.
And as it turned out, Mrs. Zhang actually agreed to help ask around.
But then, a short while ago...
At an interdisciplinary summit at the Hecheng Comprehensive National Science Center, the two of them ran into Mateo Levan.
Who was Levan?
A principal investigator at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), winner of the 2012 European Mathematical Society Prize, and an invited speaker at last year’s ICM.
His main focus was mathematical physics—partial differential equations, variational methods, and the mathematical foundations of quantum many-body systems.
To a layperson, these terms were like a foreign language.
But to Wang Shen and Xie Yi, every single word seemed to resonate deep in their hearts.
Because the foundational problem their project needed to chew on was precisely a pile of partial differential equations, variational problems, and operator spectra.
Levan was practically tailor-made for this project.
Moreover, he was actually very interested in this field.
The two of them conferred and extended an invitation on the spot.
Who would have thought that a few days later...
Mrs. Zhang would actually find someone.
"By the way, Director Wang."
Xie Yi suddenly broke the silence.
"Who was it that Sister Zhang recommended?"
Wang Shen sighed and slowly uttered four words: "Yan University, Li Dong."
Xie Yi was visibly stunned for a moment.
Of course she had heard the name Li Dong.
Basic mathematics, with two papers in top journals back-to-back, both as first author.
Within his age group in Huaxia, absolutely no one could compare to him.
No...
...looking at his peers across the globe, there was no one.
It was just that.
For their project, Li Dong wasn’t the most suitable choice.
Li Dong’s strength was in pure mathematics, in analytic number theory.
But what this project needed was mathematical physics—things like DFT, spectral inversion, variational principles, and operator ill-posedness.
Levan was indeed a much better fit.
’When it comes to scientific research, you need the right expertise.’
Xie Yi put down the issue of *Nature* and sighed.
"Sigh... It’s a bit of a shame. I was actually quite looking forward to meeting this young man."
Wang Shen nodded.
"Me too."
He paused, his voice growing heavy.
"But it’s been several years since we got that two hundred million from above, and we’re still stuck on the first one or two steps."
"We can’t be irresponsible just because of our personal preferences."
Xie Yi didn’t reply.
Their project wasn’t stuck on a later-stage task like explaining the X-ERT effect.
It was stuck on the very first step...
SX-STM.
Synchrotron radiation plus scanning tunneling microscopy.
The idea was to aim the STM tip at a single atom on a gold (111) surface and use the tunneling current excited by synchrotron X-rays to "listen" to what that single atom had to say.
Theoretically, the L2,3 absorption edge of Fe, the M4,5 absorption edge of Tb—each element would "speak" at a specific photon energy.
But the signal from a single atom was just too weak.
The sensitivity limit of traditional X-ray detection was stuck at ten thousand atoms.
Ten thousand versus one—a difference of a full four orders of magnitude.
It had been one hundred and thirty years since Roentgen discovered X-rays in 1895.
Single-atom X-ray characterization had always been the star hanging just out of reach in this field.
People had tried to pluck it.
But no one had ever truly succeeded.
Wang Shen’s team was also stuck here.
So they wanted to try a different approach, but they ran into two more hurdles.
The first was the ill-posedness of the measurement operator.
When trying to invert the incomplete tunneling spectrum back to the ligand field tensor, brute-forcing it with Tikhonov regularization always smeared the peak positions of the third coordination shell into a blur.
The second was the basis functions clashing with each other.
They tried expanding with three different basis sets, and each one produced contradictory phases, off by a full π.
The X-ERT criterion, ev≤n, could never be established.
These two problems weren’t actually chemistry problems.
They were math problems.
That’s why they wanted to borrow a mathematician’s brain, to see if they could work backward from that end to solve these first few steps.
Of course, even if they managed to work backward, there was no guarantee it would solve the problem. This was just an attempt.
Wang Shen rubbed the bridge of his nose.
"Levan has already agreed. It wouldn’t be right to back out now."
"As for Sister Zhang, we really do owe her a favor."
He looked up at Xie Yi.
"Once this business with Levan is over... we can invite the kid, Li Dong, to visit. That would be good."
Xie Yi nodded and said no more.
On the coffee table between them.
A draft of a paper, which had been spread out since evening, lay quietly.
Written on it was:
[Characterization of just one atom using synchrotron X-rays.]
The star of one hundred and thirty years.
They wanted to reach out and pluck it from the sky.

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