Five Mega-science Projects at CAS
China is going to spend about 891 million yuan RMB (or US$107.3 million) on mega-science projects at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) within its Ninth and Tenth Five-Year Plan period (1996-2005). Among the projects targeted for support are a large sky area multi-object fiber spectrographic telescope (235 million yuan, or US$28.31 million), the phase II project of National Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (118 million yuan, about US$14.2 million), a cooling storage ring at the Lanzhou Heavy-ion Accelerator (293 million yuan, about US$35.4 million), a new superconductor Tokamak facility HT-7U for controllable nuclear fusion (165 million yuan, about US$19.9 million) and the Shanghai synchrotron radiation facility (80 million yuan, or US$9.6 million).
The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectrographic Telescope (LAMOST) will be conducted by a team coming from several institutions with its office at the National Astronomical Observatories, CAS
The LAMOST is a meridian reflecting Schmidt telescope with a clear aperture of 4-meter, a focal length of 20-meter and a field of view of 5-degree. Using active optics technique to control its reflecting corrector makes the LAMOST a unique astronomical instrument in combining a large aperture with a wide field of view. The available large focal plane of 1.75-meter in diameter may accommodate up to 4000 fibers, by which the collected light of distant and faint celestial objects down to 20.5 magnitude is fed into the spectrographs, promising a very high spectrum acquiring rate of several ten-thousands of spectra per night. The telescope will be located at the Xinglong Station of National Astronomical Observatories, CAS, as a national facility open to the whole astronomical community. (http://lamost.bao.ac.cn/)
The second-phase construction of National Synchrotron Radiation Facility (NSRF) will be conducted by a research team of University of Science and Technology of China.
The Hefei synchrotron radiation facility, a second-generation light source, is the only facility dedicated to synchrotron radiation research in Mainland China. In order to give a full play to its existing instruments, as equipped during its first-phase construction in the late 1980s, and to meet the needs of its domestic users, providing an important and irreplaceable tool for promoting China's S&T development, China has started the phase-II project. When completed, 14 experimental stations will be put into operation, capable of accommodating more than 100 monographic topics per year. This step will greatly promote the growth of inter-disciplines and newly-emerging disciplines and the upbringing of a new-generation of S&T workers. A cooling storage ring at the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL-CSR) is undertaken by a research team at CAS Institute of Modern Physics.
One of the contemporary frontiers in nuclear physics is the study of the properties of radioactive nuclei that are extremely neutron-rich or neutron-deficient and located far away from the line of nuclear stability. To obtain such kind of nuclei, an accelerator has to expand its delivered ion beams from stable ones to radioactive ion beams. Meanwhile, nuclear physics is making great progress towards higher spin state. The new HIRFL-CSR facility will be capable of providing heavy ion beams in wide energy range (10-900 MeV/nucleon), manifold (including C-U stable ions, thousands of radioactive ion beams and highly charged heavy ions) and with high quality (low momentum and angular spread). It is necessary for the frontier studies in nuclear physics and related disciplines to acquire radioactive ion beams with very short lifetime so that both radioactive ion beam physics and nuclear physics under high temperature and high density in China may rank themselves among those achieved by the advanced countries in the world today. In this way, it is expected that Chinese scientist may attain innovative results in highly charged heavy ion atomic physics, explore new possibilities in the synthesis of new nuclei and make breakthroughs at the frontiers of nuclear astrophysics and applications of heavy ion beamsto materials science and life science. (http://210.12.32.90/usr/yuanyj/csrinter/index.html)
A new superconductor Tokamak facility HT-7U for controllable nuclear fusion will be constructed by CAS Institute of Plasma Physics.
The HT-7U Tokamak facility is a new sophisticated device for testing nuclear fusion with a non-circular cross section. The progress achieved from the successful magnetic confined fusion on conventional Tokamak devices in the world has proved its theoretical feasibility. In order to transform it into a workable reactor of nuclear fusion, two key problems must be solved, i.e. the maintenance of its stable and durable operation and the rise of its confinement efficiency. The HT-7U facility is noted for its non-circular cross section shape with a large elongation ratio as well as the integration of its toroidal superconducting field with the flexibly-controlled poloidal superconducing field, which is to increase the plasma parameters and improve the performance of the plasma confinement. Because of this outstanding feature, experiments can be carried out on it in a bid to introduce a stable and high-performance operation mode on a Tokamak facility under the circumstances of high ratio between plasma pressure and toroidal magnetic field, high plasma confinement, and high boot strap current. Thus, through this facility, CAS scientists are able to make contributions to the complete solution of the two above-listed problems.
The design parameters of the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF) are better than those of all the third-generation synchrotron radiation light sources existing in the world, or are equal to those of all the most advanced ones under consideration and leave room for the development of a fourth generation light source (high gain free electron laser).
Compared with the second-generation light sources, the luminosity of the third-generation ones is increased by a factor of 3-4. Not only do they possess high momentum resolution and high energy resolution of the first- and second-generation light sources, but also provide high space resolution and high time resolution, thus offering unprecedented new opportunities for the study of basic frontiers and development of new high-tech applied areas.
