About State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces

State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces

The State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces, abbreviated PCOSS, is a national research laboratory in the College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Xiamen University in Xiamen, Fujian. It was established in the late 1980s following a national initiative and was completed and officially opened in 1990. Its mission is basic research in the chemical sciences of solid surfaces and of solid-gas and solid-liquid interfaces, directed toward the major scientific issues of energy systems. The laboratory has an exceptional record in China's national evaluations: it was ranked in the highest category, a Grade A laboratory, in all five national reviews of state key laboratories in which it was assessed, in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014, and it was granted the title of Advanced Group and awarded the Golden Award at the state key laboratory anniversary commendation meetings. Its directors have included some of the most prominent names in Chinese physical chemistry, beginning with the electrochemist Tian Zhaowu.

Establishment in the late 1980s

Xiamen University's English introduction records that the laboratory was established in the late 1980s, during China's resurgence period, through rigorous inter-ministerial debate on a scheme proposed by the State Planning Commission of the Government of China, and was funded by what is now the Ministry of Science and Technology. In 1990 the laboratory was completed, and since then it has opened its doors to researchers from national and international communities. The laboratory's own introduction adds that it holds a long-standing research culture summarised in a motto of dedication and collaboration. Its institutional roots run deeper than its formal founding: Xiamen University's chemistry discipline was founded in 1921, and the College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering itself was established in 1991 on that foundation, the year after the laboratory opened. Figures such as Jiaxi Lu, a former president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, are part of the college's history, and the laboratory grew up inside one of China's strongest chemistry communities.

Directors and scientific leadership

The university records that Academician Zhaowu Tian, Academician Hui-Lin Wan, Academician Zhong-Qun Tian and Professor Zhao-Xiong Xie have served as directors of the laboratory, and that academicians Khi-Rui Tsai, Qian-Er Zhang and Hui-Lin Wan are former directors of its academic committee. Tian Zhaowu, born in Fuzhou in 1927, was a founder of modern electrochemistry in China, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences from 1980, a former president of Xiamen University and chairman of the Chinese Chemical Society, and the first director of the laboratory, whose construction he promoted from 1986. His son's generation followed in the same institution: Zhong-Qun Tian entered Xiamen University's chemistry department in 1978, took his doctorate at the University of Southampton in 1987 with a thesis on in-situ Raman spectroscopic studies of electrodeposition and electrosorption supervised by Martin Fleischmann, became a professor in the laboratory in 1992, its deputy director in 1996 and its director from 2003 to 2011, and went on to direct the Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials. Xiamen University's earlier English page names Professor Ye Wang as director with Academician Shi-Gang Sun chairing the academic committee, while the laboratory's most recent introduction lists Academician Nan-Feng Zheng as current director, with Bin Ren, Qingyu Lin, Gang Fu and Xu Hou as deputy directors.

People and scale

The laboratory's most recent introduction records 129 permanent faculty members, including 109 senior researchers, among them five members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and twenty-six awardees of the Distinguished Young Scholar's Fund of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, supported by 15 staff technicians and five management personnel. An earlier university summary gave 67 permanent faculty members with six academicians and sixteen Distinguished Young Scholar awardees, so the two snapshots together show a laboratory that has roughly doubled its permanent faculty while keeping an unusually high density of nationally recognised researchers. The college around it reports 174 teaching faculty in total, of whom eight — including Zhaowu Tian, Qianer Zhang, Huilin Wan, Zhongqun Tian and Shigang Sun — have been elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, giving the laboratory a concentration of senior physical chemists matched by few institutions in China.

The mission: surfaces, interfaces and energy

The laboratory's mission, as Xiamen University defines it, is to conduct basic research in the chemical sciences of solid surfaces and solid-gas and solid-liquid interfaces, and to meet the country's major strategic needs by carrying out leading-edge research focused on the major scientific issues related to energy systems. Almost every energy technology depends on exactly these interfaces: catalysts act at solid surfaces exposed to gases and liquids, batteries and fuel cells work through reactions at electrode-electrolyte interfaces, and solar and storage materials succeed or fail at their surfaces. The laboratory's current introduction frames its target in terms of the national goal of carbon neutrality and the prior need of energy security, focusing on a clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient energy system and on solving fundamental scientific problems in large-scale energy storage, the efficient and clean use of carbon-based energy, and carbon dioxide capture and recycling.

Research achievements and directions

The laboratory's own introduction summarises its fields of significant achievement: surface and interface chemistry, leading research in the catalytic conversion of C1 molecules, electrochemical energy conversion and storage, advanced spectroscopy and imaging methods, the chemistry of atomic and molecular clusters, and theory on electronic structures. C1 chemistry — the conversion of one-carbon molecules such as methane, methanol, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide into fuels and chemicals — is a field in which Xiamen physical chemists, including Hui-Lin Wan's generation, built international reputations, because it addresses both the use of natural gas and coal-derived feedstocks and the recycling of carbon dioxide. Electrochemical energy conversion and storage connects the laboratory's founding electrochemistry tradition to batteries, fuel cells and electrolysis. The cluster chemistry and electronic structure theory programmes supply the atomic-level understanding of the active sites at which surface reactions actually occur.

Spectroscopy, electrochemistry and method development

Method development is a hallmark of the laboratory. Zhong-Qun Tian's career, from his Southampton doctorate on in-situ Raman spectroscopy of electrode processes onward, exemplifies its approach of building new instruments and techniques to observe interfaces while reactions are running, rather than only before and after. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and its electrochemical applications became a Xiamen speciality with influence well beyond China, and the laboratory's listed achievements in advanced spectroscopy and imaging methods continue that tradition. Its long-standing collaboration with French partners illustrates the same point internationally: an associated international laboratory with the French national research centre CNRS and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris ran from 2006 to 2014 and produced over 40 jointly published papers and four patents across electrochemistry, bio-electrochemistry, microfluidics and nanoscience, before being extended into a successor laboratory on nanobiocatalysis and electrochemistry with additional partners at the University of Rennes 1 and Wuhan University, launched at a ceremony in Xiamen attended by the laboratory's director and French scientific officials.

The Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials

The laboratory's energy mission is reinforced by its relationship with the Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials, known as 2011-iChEM, established in September 2012, whose director was Zhong-Qun Tian and which the College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering describes as having achieved substantial synergies with the laboratory. Collaborative innovation centres were a Chinese policy instrument for concentrating several institutions' strengths on a strategic problem, and in Xiamen's case the problem was energy materials and chemistry. The centre and the laboratory share people, facilities and programmes, so that surface and interface science done in the laboratory feeds directly into a wider, multi-institution effort on energy conversion and storage, and the energy questions in turn supply the laboratory with its defining applied horizon without displacing its basic research character.

Evaluation record and honours

Few Chinese laboratories can match PCOSS's evaluation record. The laboratory was reviewed in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014 by external committees of experts organised through the national assessment system and ranked in the highest category, Grade A, on all five occasions — a record the College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering also emphasises, describing the laboratory as evaluated among the top laboratories in chemistry and chemical engineering five times consecutively over twenty years. At the state key laboratory system's tenth anniversary meeting in 1994 and twentieth anniversary meeting in 2004, the laboratory was granted the title of Advanced Group and awarded the Golden Award. Sustaining the top grade across a quarter of a century of changing evaluation panels is a strong indicator of institutional continuity: the laboratory has renewed its leadership, its faculty and its research directions repeatedly while keeping its core identity in surface physical chemistry.

Place in Chinese physical chemistry

The State Key Laboratory of Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces is, in effect, the institutional home of a school of Chinese physical chemistry that began with Tian Zhaowu's electrochemical research group at Xiamen University, which trained electrochemists who spread across China, and which built its own instruments and wrote its own textbooks at a time when foreign equipment monopolies constrained Chinese laboratories. Established formally in the late 1980s and opened in 1990, rated Grade A in five consecutive national reviews, led in succession by academicians and now comprising some 129 permanent faculty, the laboratory continues to define its subject — the physical chemistry of solid surfaces and interfaces — in the service of catalysis, electrochemistry and the energy systems on which China's carbon neutrality goal depends.