"How would you feel about having your name on this pre-research project? Don’t worry, you’d only be responsible for the math side. They have their own people for the physics."
"The main issue is the data inversion part. The old hands in the group are used to wrestling with Tikhonov and Bayes, and their thinking has gotten a bit rigid."
"When your ’Comment’ paper came out, they passed it around and read it several times. The consensus was... you’re the only one who can help them rebuild the mathematical foundation."
Li Dong felt a small thrill of excitement.
It wasn’t because he was being pulled into another big project.
It was because...
This was physics.
Physics was his first love.
Although the label attached to him was "mathematics," that didn’t stop him from doing physics.
Li Dong nodded repeatedly.
"Teacher Zhang, please pass a message to Teacher Shen for me. I’ll take the job."
"As for the specifics of my involvement and at what stage I’ll jump in, just have him call me whenever he’s decided. My schedule is definitely flexible."
Zhang Wenping smiled.
"Great. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Old Shen will probably be over the moon when he hears this."
Then he added,
"By the way, I’m joining this group too. Mainly to help Old Shen and the others sort out the mathematical framework."
Li Dong was a little surprised.
’Academician Zhang is joining too?’
The weight of this group, then, couldn’t be summed up with just the words "pretty big."
He joked with a smile.
"Well, that’s fantastic. I’ll just treat it as a chance to learn from you."
Zhang Wenping waved his hands dismissively.
"Stop flattering me. At your current level, it’s hard to say who’d be learning from whom."
The two of them looked at each other and smiled.
After leaving Meiyuan, Li Dong had originally planned to return to Yan University the next day.
The review for the national competition hadn’t officially started yet. The main purpose of his trip was to meet with a few of the judges beforehand and establish the rules.
But Shen Che stopped him.
The pre-research project hadn’t actually been officially launched yet.
The official project approval documents would take a while.
According to procedure, the work couldn’t officially begin until the approval was finalized, the group was formed, and decisions were made at the first group meeting.
But that was all on the procedural side of things.
Old Shen’s thinking was simple...
Since Li Dong had agreed, he shouldn’t let this trip be for nothing.
While everyone was in Jinling for these few days, he would simply take Li Dong on a tour to meet his people.
That way, when the approval really came through and the group was officially formed, Li Dong could jump right in.
He wouldn’t be dazed by a barrage of unfamiliar terms right from the start.
So, for the next few days, Li Dong started making the rounds.
On the first day, Shen Che took Li Dong on a tour of the old building of Jinling University’s School of Physics.
Shen Che wasn’t a man of many words, but when he was showing Li Dong things, he didn’t omit a single detail that needed to be said.
He took the opportunity to introduce Li Dong to the core faculty members of this pre-research project.
There were engineers who built high-energy particle detectors and astrophysicists who simulated the space environment. Everyone was very polite to Li Dong.
Every time they entered a room, Shen Che would point to the charts on the walls, the spectra spread out on the tables, and the data running on the screens, laying out the context for Li Dong in just a few sentences.
"Look over there. Old Zhou is wrestling with the position resolution of the silicon microstrips."
"Old Wu has been having a headache over the energy leakage problem in the BGO calorimeter lately."
"And Old Zheng, he’s mainly in charge of monitoring the radiation environment of high-energy electrons in space."
With each room he entered, Li Dong would exchange a few pleasantries with the professor, glance at a chart, ask one or two trivial questions, and then follow Shen Che out.
He didn’t voice his own ideas.
He knew this wasn’t the time to speak up.
This trip was for making the rounds, for getting to know people.
Not for stealing the spotlight.
「The next morning」
Shen Che drove up Zijin Mountain.
He drove to the summit, circled past the domes of the old observatories, and stopped in front of a new building with a sign that read: "Dark Matter Particle Detection Collaborative Innovation Center."
This was one of the sites for the Wukong Satellite’s ground data processing center.
Shen Che led Li Dong into a small conference room.
On the wall of the conference room hung an energy spectrum chart that was half a person tall.
The horizontal axis of the chart was a logarithmic scale sweeping from GeV all the way to PeV, and the vertical axis was the flux multiplied by E to the third power.
In the section to the right of the center, the energy spectrum had a distinct drop.
Shen Che pointed to that spot.
"See that? Right here. This is the break in the TeV electron energy spectrum that the Wukong Satellite detected in 2017."
"Back then, this is what got us a paper in *Nature*."
Li Dong stared at the break for a few seconds.
He didn’t say anything, just silently calculated the slopes on both sides of the break in his head.
Shen Che didn’t rush him and continued with a sigh.
"This one break was debated internationally for almost two years."
"Some guessed it was a nearby source, like a pulsar."
"Others thought it was a change in the diffusion coefficient of cosmic rays propagating through the interstellar medium."
"And another faction insisted it was a trace left by dark matter particle annihilation."
"All three groups had their own reasoning, and no one could convince the others."
His finger traced a line further to the right on the chart.
"But if you look further to the right, once the energy range passes 10 TeV, nobody dares to speak too loudly."
"Why? Because the statistical data is too sparse, and on top of that, the inversion process is always plagued by illusion peaks."
"In that section, no matter what kind of bump that looks like a physical structure appears, no one dares to beat their chest and guarantee that it’s real."
At this moment, Li Dong spoke up.
"I understand, Teacher Shen."
"So, the problem you’re trying to solve right now is essentially how to distinguish the ’real structures’ from the ’illusion peaks’ in this part of the spectrum, right?"

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