Group Home
Lei Zhou
Post Doctoral Researcher
Biomedical Imaging Technology Center		  
Office:
531 Asbury Circle
Suite 531
Atlanta, GA 30322-4600
Tel:404.712.2696(shared with others)
Fax:404.712.2707(whole office)
mailto:lzhou5@emory.edu
 Mail:
Woodruff Memorial Building
1639 Pierce Drive, Suite 2001
Atlanta, GA 30322-4600

Maxims:

1. The principle(or say, the universe, the God) does everything for nothing.
道 常 无 为 而 无 不 为。
2. One will only be great if he never struggles for being great.
以 其 终 不 自 为 大 ， 故 能 成 其 大。
3. The spirit (or say idea) may be accepted over the world without the body's travelling around.
足 不 出 户 而 道 行 于 千 里 之 外。

 
Wisdom is born on a planet. However, wisdom will finally take a born from the womb of the mother planet, and sets steps into the universe. So do we human being on the earth. And this will happen within several hundred years.
I have worked in physics research area for 11 years since I was a graduate student. However, I feel very doomful about both my research projects and many papers I browsed through. It is clear that advanced measurement/test technology has become a critical role for experimental physics, which is both over expensive and dependent with the genius of custom design. Knowledge and genius are usually rendered into a waste of life just because one is not charm or lucky enough to get enough funding. Meanwhile, many stories have been spread that many very expensive and useful equipments had been abandoned because the original owner failed to find resource for supporting them. Even for those who were lucky enough of obtained funds to build the equipment he had dreamed for, many doomful downfalls are on the way before he could take the advantage of new equipments. The design might be not optimized for his desire because there might not be a person whose technical knowledge is broad enough for bargaining with vendors. The shipped equipment might not be like what he thought it should be because there might be some commercial reasons or misunderstandings between the customer and the vendor. The training of operating complex facilities is conflict with the training of theoretical thinking of his scientific projects. The time spent on making a system work often made the system out-of-date and ran out of the patient of funding agencies. The result is, most of research groups are forced to live with very limited equipments. And, most of cooperations are based on personal fellowship.

Scientific researches are supposed to explore new knowledge that will form future business. They should be able to take the advantage of the most advanced industrial techniques and management skills. The broad cooperation in biology and nuclear physics has been proven very successful and productive. For example, the data taken from solo high energy accelerators are shared by all theoretical physicists for improving their theories. The standard procedures of measuring molecular structure of protein and of determining the sequence of genes have brought these two fields into a kind of industry. Nobody needs to build or buy all the techniques totally by his funds. And their works get published as a television is made and delivered to a supermarket.

Condensed matter physics should also take this way if it wants a brighter future. As what all of us have known, most of the experimental methods have been already well developed by different groups in the past 50 years. The critical difference of competing groups is that the methods they can access are different or on different technical levels. Supposing that a comprehensive physics measurement center is constructed in a universities/research institutes condensed area, for example, the San Francisco Bay area, all research groups can deliver their samples with a list of measuring requirement, like what we do in a hospital, where the blood sample of a patient is delivered to a laboratory with a list of order, and obtain a feed back by a first come first serve bias, all groups will be set into a balanced competition environment and they will surely be able to concentrate more on the physics they are interested. Meanwhile, the "Physical Property Measurement Laboratory (PPML)" will be able to attract a big group of physicists and technical geniuses, who will work together to keep everything up-to-date with most recent advanced technology and fulfill most recent enhanced customer requirement. They will never suffer of funds breaking down or project cancellation if the demands match their availability.

The researches of condensed matter physics can be summarized as to explore the unknown territory in a state space, in which the variables are uniform composition, composition space distribution, defects, temperature, temperature gradient, temperature ramping rate, temperature wave, uniform pressure, pressure gradient, pressure ramping rate, pressure wave, uniform electro-magnetic field, field gradient, field ramping rate, and alternation field in different bands, and the function values are state, symmetricity, resistance, susceptibility, specific heat, ...

As a basic proposal, such a PPML will include all wide applied measurement techniques. A partial list is in below:

No. Name Purpose Technique Core instruments User groups
1. Crystal structure measurement facility For obtain the structural information of newly discovered materials Powder x-ray scattering and structural refinement Synchrotron x-ray; multiple CCD; all motorized and automated; proper sample environment control for delicate samples New material seeking groups; groups who are interested with doped materials; groups who are interested in phase transitions
2. Crystal quality certification facility Give professional measurement of crystal quality, like mosaic, twin, etc. 4-circle single crystal x-ray diffraction Synchrotron x-ray; 4-circle diffractometer; small area CCD camera; all motorized and automated; proper sample environment control for delicate samples Sample synthesis groups; groups who produce single crystals
3. High intensity resolution x-ray scattering facility Detcting weak superstructures 2-circle sample motion with half sphere or more compound eye detector array Synchrotron x-ray; cold finger temperature stage, in vacuum Groups that interest in fine electron struture with long range orders
4. Extended x-ray absorption fine structure facility Measuring short range orders EXAFS on sychrotron radiation High energy resolution monochromator; complex sample environment control (temperature, magnetic field, other excitation source, etc); real time data analysis; Groups that interest in local structures
5. Scan tunnel electron microscopy facility Measuring surface structure STM, AFM, etc. Groups that interest in surface structures
6. Transport property measurement facility Measuring resistance, susceptibility, specific heat, etc. Physical property measurement system, etc. Nearly every group
7. Continuous laser spectrum facility Raman scattering, Brillouin scattering, etc.
8. Ultra fast laser spectrum facility Dynamics
9. Non-elastic x-ray scattering
10. Neutron scattering
11. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES)
12. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)
13. Ultra fast x-ray scattering Dynamics
14. Micro zone x-ray scattering
15. Extreme condition platform
16.