About Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics

Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics

The Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, known by the abbreviation WNLO, is China's national laboratory and national research center for optoelectronics, based in Wuhan, Hubei Province, and supported by Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST). It was one of the five national laboratories approved for preparatory construction by the Ministry of Science and Technology in November 2003, and in 2017 it became the Wuhan national research center for optoelectronics, one of the six national research centers the ministry approved that year. The laboratory is jointly built by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education, the Hubei Provincial Government and the Wuhan Municipal Government, with three joint construction organisations alongside HUST: the Innovation Academy for Precision Measurement Science and Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Information and Communication Technologies Group, and the Huazhong Institute of Electro-Optics. As an interdisciplinary research center it focuses on the fundamental scientific and technological questions of information optoelectronics, energy optoelectronics and life optoelectronics, and it is the research core of Wuhan's Optics Valley, the East Lake high-technology zone that is China's largest optoelectronics industry cluster.

Founding and joint construction

WNLO's approval in November 2003 placed Wuhan in the first cohort of China's pilot national laboratories, alongside laboratories in Beijing, Hefei and Shenyang. A contemporary account records that it was co-established by the Ministry of Education and the Hubei and Wuhan governments, managed by HUST, and collaborating with the Wuhan Research Institute of Posts and Telecommunications, the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Huazhong Institute of Electro-Optics; the ministry approved the feasibility plan for its construction in November 2006. The joint-construction list has since been restated in current terms, with the precision measurement academy succeeding the physics and mathematics institute's role and the state communications technology group succeeding the posts and telecommunications institute's, but the structure is unchanged: a national laboratory rooted in a university and reinforced by the academy institutes and industry research organisations of China's optoelectronics capital. Its experimental park of 60 mu contains the 45,000-square-metre Experimental Building of Optoelectronics.

Wuhan and Optics Valley

The laboratory cannot be separated from its city. Wuhan is described in the trade press as the cradle of China's optoelectronics and telecommunications industry; the Wuhan Research Institute of Posts and Telecommunications pioneered Chinese optical fibre communication, and in 2001 the Wuhan city government launched the Optics Valley of China within the Wuhan East Lake High-Tech Development Zone. A national research center for optical telecommunications engineering had been established in Wuhan as early as 1994. WNLO, founded two years after Optics Valley, became its academic core: the laboratory describes itself as the innovation and research base of Optics Valley, and its technology transfer organisations, including the Wuhan Industrial Institute for Optoelectronics established to support research and development, testing and enterprise incubation, were created to move laboratory results into the surrounding industry. By its own account the laboratory has transferred 118 patents and intellectual property rights since 2013 with a net value exceeding 120 million yuan, and its MOST brain-imaging technology patent was transferred for 10 million yuan, reported as the top price among domestic universities at the time.

Research organisation: three optoelectronics

The laboratory summarises its mission in three fields. Information optoelectronics covers optoelectronic devices and integration, optical communication and networks, and information storage and display. Energy optoelectronics covers photonics for energy, including solar cells, and laser and terahertz technology. Life optoelectronics covers biomedical photonics and brain imaging. Earlier descriptions of the laboratory list the same territory as research divisions in biomedical photonics, optoelectronic devices and integration, information storage and optical display, photonics for energy, laser and terahertz technology, and optoelectronic detection and radiation, organised in its early years into 36 academic research groups. In its twentieth-anniversary summary the laboratory lists its fruitful fields as brain imaging, solar cells, ultrafast lasers, laser manufacturing, structured light, multi-dimensional optical communications, optoelectronic devices and integration, and data storage.

Biomedical photonics and the MOST brain atlas

The laboratory's most celebrated result is in life optoelectronics. The Britton Chance Center for Biomedical Photonics at the laboratory descends from the institute for biomedical photonics formed by Qingming Luo on his return to HUST in 1997 from the University of Pennsylvania laboratory of Britton Chance. Luo's team built MOST, a micro-optical sectioning tomography system, and in 2010 announced the world's first three-dimensional structural dataset of a Golgi-stained whole mouse brain at neurite level, published in Science. The achievement gave neuroscience a complete anatomical reference of a mammalian brain at the resolution of its wiring, and it established the laboratory internationally in brain imaging, a field it continues to list first among its results. Luo served as a vice president of HUST and executive deputy director of the laboratory.

Output and intellectual property

The laboratory's published institutional accounts give the scale of its first decades. A HUST summary records 3,123 projects undertaken, including national 973 Programme projects, 73 of them at the ten-million-yuan level; more than 5,900 papers in SCI-indexed journals from 2004 onwards, including four in Science and twenty in Nature-family journals; and 1,438 issued patents, 26 of them international. An earlier account, for 2004 to 2009 alone, records 224 invention patents, 103 utility patents, 24 software copyrights and 347 patent applications of various kinds. The laboratory has been approved as a state-level international joint research center by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the foreign experts administration, and it reports collaborative relationships with more than 40 major research institutions, universities and businesses worldwide. In 2023 the laboratory marked its twentieth anniversary jointly with the journal Chinese Optics Letters, publishing a special issue of nine invited reviews and papers across optoelectronics for information, energy and life science.

Information optoelectronics in practice

In information optoelectronics the laboratory's work follows Wuhan's industrial strengths: optical communication systems and networks, the devices and photonic integration on which they depend, and optical storage. Structured light and multi-dimensional optical communications, both named in its anniversary summary, are techniques for increasing the information carried by light beyond simple intensity and wavelength channels. Data storage research at the laboratory addresses optical and photonic approaches to the density and speed limits of conventional storage. These directions are pursued in the same building as the laser and device groups, which is the point of the national laboratory design: communication, devices, lasers and storage form one optoelectronic system, and the laboratory was built to research it whole.

Energy optoelectronics and lasers

In energy optoelectronics the laboratory reports results in solar cells, ultrafast lasers and laser manufacturing. Laser science and technology has been a named direction since the laboratory's founding accounts, covering both the science of laser systems, including ultrafast and terahertz sources, and their application to manufacturing processes. Solar cell work places the laboratory in the photovoltaics research mainstream, where optoelectronics and energy technology meet. Together with its detection and radiation work, these directions give the laboratory a presence across the full cycle of light: generating it, controlling it, transmitting information with it, converting it to electricity and using it to measure and image.

Aims and national role

The laboratory states its ambition as becoming an academic innovation center, discipline leading center, talent cultivation center, and scientific knowledge dissemination and achievement transfer center with important international influence in optoelectronic science. It describes itself as a major component of China's national science and technology innovation system. Within the six-center framework of 2017 it is the only center devoted to optoelectronics, and the only one in central China, anchoring the national system in the industry cluster that surrounds it. Its neighbouring institutions in Optics Valley, from fibre manufacturers to laser companies, make its transfer mission concrete in a way few basic research platforms can match.

Assessment

WNLO's documented record combines continuity and scale: preparatory approval in 2003 and feasibility approval in 2006, elevation to national research center in 2017, joint construction by two ministries, a province, a city, a university, academy institutes and an industry group, thousands of projects and papers, more than a thousand patents, and a signature result, the 2010 mouse brain atlas in Science, that is known well beyond its own field. It is the research heart of Optics Valley and China's national address for optoelectronic science.