On the tablet was a conference announcement that had just been updated.
It was for an internal, closed-door workshop under the XTIP beamline at Argonne National Laboratory.
[XTIP Beamline: Industry and Academia Joint Workshop].
The workshop was closed-door, open only to a few invited collaborators and industrial partners.
The announcement listed the oral presentation schedule for the third day of the conference.
Two names were written in the presenter column.
The first was Albrecht from the Max Planck Institute.
The second was Bai Hu from Argonne National Laboratory.
The presentation title was:
"A Hybrid Tikhonov-Variational Inversion Scheme for Single-Atom NEXAFS Spectroscopy: Closing the Final Seam of SX-STM"
Beneath the title were two lines of small text.
[Patent Application: Submitted to the World Intellectual Property Organization in April 2023]
[Manuscript Status: Undergoing peer review at *Nature*, submitted April 2023]
What did this mean?
To put it in plain terms:
"To all our peers: we have completely solved this problem and have already filed the patent. If you’re working on the same topic, you can stop now and save your funding, because we’ve already beaten you to the punch."
At first, Li Dong didn’t think much of it.
Not until he scrolled down to the methodology description below the extended abstract.
[We employed a multi-layer Tikhonov regularization with adaptive cyclic weighting, combined with a variational method acting on the third coordination shell, to fully reuse the residual phase information...]
Li Dong’s brows furrowed instantly.
Mathematical inversion.
This group had taken the mathematical inversion path.
And looking at the preview figures posted below the extended abstract...
They had managed to forcibly resolve the peak positions in the third coordination shell, which had been just a blurry mess.
Li Dong stared at those figures for a long time.
His own physical path, which used Gamov quantum tunneling to bypass the two walls, was like walking through a door between them.
But this German group had taken the path of mathematical inversion.
According to Li Dong’s intuitive deductions that night, this path was a dead end.
But these figures before him...
’Did they actually make it work?’
Beside Wu Kai, Zhang Yan was quietly filling their professor in on the background.
"Professor, the leader of this group is Albrecht. He’s from Max Planck."
"In the field of surface physics, he’s produced some rather impressive results over the past few years."
"His most well-known achievement is the gadolinium-based proximal advanced contrast agent his group developed three years ago."
Li Dong blinked.
’Gadolinium-based proximal contrast agent?’
Li Dong looked back at Zhang Yan.
"Sister Yan, what’s that?"
Zhang Yan glanced at him and sighed.
"East God, you’re a math guy, so you don’t have much contact with the clinical side of things."
"This contrast agent is used for contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging."
"Compared to the previous generation of contrast agents, it significantly reduces gadolinium deposition in brain tissue."
"After it hit the market, his group published two papers in *Cell* and one in *The New England Journal of Medicine*."
"It’s one of the most significant advances in medical imaging in the last two years."
Li Dong nodded.
"Sounds like they did a good thing."
Zhang Yan gave a wry smile.
"East God, you don’t know the half of it."
"Once this kind of research reaches the implementation stage, patents always follow."
"That contrast agent is priced at around three hundred US Dollars per dose in Europe and America."
"Here in Huaxia, it’s six thousand eight hundred per dose."
"That’s roughly triple the price."
Li Dong raised an eyebrow.
Zhang Yan shook her head.
"Making money is one thing. They invested a lot in R&D, so it’s understandable."
"The problem is,"
"our national health insurance has been trying to negotiate the price down with them repeatedly."
"but even now, they refuse to be included in the health insurance catalog, no matter what."
"They’d rather rely on out-of-pocket payments than concede a single step."
She sighed.
"So now, in the top-tier hospitals in the country, when elderly people need a contrast-enhanced MRI for cardiovascular or cerebrovascular checks, it’s six thousand eight hundred a dose."
"If they can’t afford it, the doctor has no choice but to use a lower-grade alternative."
"And when they use a lower-grade one, tiny, early-stage lesions get missed."
Li Dong remained silent upon hearing this.
Before, his thoughts about the German group were just ’Oh, they’re ahead of us. We need to speed up.’
But after hearing Zhang Yan’s words, that sense of urgency to "speed up" suddenly took on a different flavor.
’If they beat us to the characterization of the single-atom nanozyme this time...’
A real sense of anxiety began to build in Li Dong’s heart.
Wu Kai sat at the main console, staring at the conference announcement.
He read the abstract from beginning to end, word by word.
When he finished, he slapped the tablet down on the desk, his expression grim.
Li Dong spoke up tentatively.
"Teacher Wu?"
Wu Kai didn’t answer.
After a long moment, he let out a heavy breath.
"We... need to pick up the pace."
Li Dong nodded.
Sometimes, this whole research game is just about who’s faster.
If you’re a step too slow, you get nothing.
Wu Kai looked up at Li Dong.
"Have you made any more progress on the mathematical inversion front?"
Li Dong shook his head.
"Teacher Wu, my physical path has already bypassed the two walls we needed to get around."
"As for the mathematical inversion side..."
He hadn’t figured it out himself yet.
He could feel intuitively that the mathematical inversion path was a dead end.
But now, with this announcement slapped in front of him...
This German group seemed to have actually made it work.
He said to Wu Kai,
"Teacher Wu, I’ll go back and work on the mathematical inversion some more."
"Whether our path works is one thing, but if they’ve really found a way through, I at least need to understand how they did it and whether their path is better than ours."
Wu Kai nodded.
"Alright."
He hesitated for a moment, then added,
"Li Dong, if that path doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Don’t force it. Your physical path is already good enough."
Li Dong grunted in acknowledgment.
He didn’t respond to Wu Kai’s last sentence.
Because that announcement had already wound the string in his heart as tight as it could go.
Li Dong sat in the North Building of the School of Chemistry for a while longer, going over the conference announcement a second time with Wu Kai from top to bottom before getting up to leave.
It was just after two in the afternoon when he walked out of the North Building of the School of Chemistry.
His mind was a mess.
As he walked, his feet unconsciously led him toward the library.
Li Dong thought he might as well check out the materials on mathematical inversion again and see if there was any literature he had missed.
Upon entering the library, he headed straight for the mathematics section on the third floor.
He walked up to a row of shelves, about to pull out a book titled *Inverse Problems in Mathematical Physics*.
A familiar figure emerged from the adjacent aisle.
"Qi Yu?"
Qi Yu, holding a stack of books, looked up when she heard her name.
"Li Dong, what a coincidence."
Only then did Li Dong notice the stack of books in her arms.
There were at least a dozen of them.
He glanced at them subconsciously.
*Modern Physical Methods in Biochemistry*, *Single-Atom Catalysis: Materials and Applications*...
’These don’t seem like books Qi Yu would be reading... or rather, Qi Yu probably wouldn’t understand them.’
So, Li Dong asked,
"What are these for?"
Qi Yu smiled and shook her head.
"They’re not for me. They’re for my professor."
"Your professor?"
Li Dong paused for a second.
’Professor Zhang Lufang?’
That made sense. He asked subconsciously,
"How has Teacher Zhang been lately?"
"I haven’t seen her in a long time."

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