About State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics

State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics

The State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics, in the Department of Physics at Fudan University in Shanghai, is one of China's founding laboratories for the physics of surfaces and interfaces. Sponsored by the State Planning Commission, its establishment began in 1990 on the proposal of the eminent physicist Xide Xie, and it officially opened at the end of December 1992. Its first laboratory director was Xun Wang, according to some sources, and some render its name in full as the State Key Laboratory of Applied Surface Physics. Its research covers condensed matter physics, semiconductor surfaces and interfaces, optoelectronics and ultrathin magnetic films — fields it has helped lead as they evolved into today's science of two-dimensional materials, topological matter and quantum devices.

Foundations: Xide Xie and Fudan Physics

The laboratory cannot be understood apart from Xide Xie (1921–2000). Born in Quanzhou, Fujian, on 19 March 1921, she took her bachelor's degree at Amoy University in 1946, a master's at Smith College in 1949 and a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951, then returned to China to teach in Fudan's physics department from 1952. She became professor in 1962, was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980, served as vice-president of Fudan from 1978 and as president from 1983 to 1989 — the first female president of a Chinese university — and remained a university advisor until her death from breast cancer on 4 March 2000.

Xie's science was concentrated in solid-state physics, semiconductor physics and surface physics. Her book Semiconductor Physics, written with K. Huang, became one of the most widely used physics textbooks in China. In 1977 she founded Fudan's Institute of Modern Physics, serving as its director from 1978 to 1983, obtained funding for eight modern research laboratories in surface physics, and helped revive physics in China by aiding hundreds of young physicists to study abroad. The State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics, proposed by Xie and sponsored by the State Planning Commission from 1990, was the institutional culmination of that programme: a national platform, at the university she led, for the field she had pioneered in China.

Establishment and Opening

Fudan's Physics Department history records the founding facts: sponsored by the State Planning Commission, the laboratory started to be established in 1990, was proposed by Professor Xide Xie, and officially opened to the public at the end of December 1992. The Physics Department itself was founded in 1952, seeded from the physics group of the former Department of Mathematics and Physics and merged with parts of physics departments from eight East China universities during the national reorganisation, and has developed into one of the key centres for physics research and education in China. The laboratory is one of three key laboratories the department runs, alongside two Ministry of Education laboratories for computational physical sciences and micro- and nano-photonic structures.

The timing placed the laboratory at the start of a transformative decade for surface science. Scanning tunnelling microscopy and other probe techniques were making it possible to image and manipulate matter atom by atom, semiconductor heterostructures were becoming the basis of modern electronics and optoelectronics, and ultrathin magnetic films were opening the field that became spintronics. A national laboratory for surface physics, equipped for the ultrahigh-vacuum and precision-measurement techniques the field requires, positioned Fudan at the centre of those developments in China.

Semiconductor Surfaces and Interfaces

The laboratory's classic research core is the physics of semiconductor surfaces and interfaces. Every semiconductor device — transistor, laser, detector, solar cell — depends on what happens where materials meet: at surfaces, junctions and boundaries only atoms thick, where electronic states differ fundamentally from the bulk. Xie's own field of semiconductor surface physics addressed the structure, electronic properties and reconstruction of those surfaces, and the laboratory carried that programme forward with modern instrumentation.

This work is simultaneously fundamental and technological. Understanding a surface state or an interface band alignment is basic condensed matter physics; it is also the knowledge required to engineer contacts, passivate defects and design heterostructures. In a department whose faculty work across condensed matter physics, atomic, molecular and optical physics, theoretical and computational physics, the laboratory's surface programme connects experiment on real materials to theory of electronic structure.

Ultrathin Films, Magnetism and Low-Dimensional Matter

Ultrathin magnetic films were named among the laboratory's founding research areas. Films only a few atoms thick behave magnetically in ways bulk materials do not — their magnetic order, anisotropy and coupling across interfaces can be engineered layer by layer — and they became the material basis for magnetic sensing, storage and spin electronics. Research on such films requires precisely the laboratory's capabilities: epitaxial growth, surface characterisation and measurement at the nanoscale.

From ultrathin films, the laboratory's field evolved naturally into low-dimensional quantum materials. Fudan's Frontier Quantum Materials Laboratory, working within the department and the laboratory's ecosystem, studies topological Dirac quantum materials, twisted graphene, two-dimensional superconductors, magnetic heterostructures and photodetectors based on low-dimensional atomic crystals. Its researchers explain the attraction: topological insulators have an energy gap in the bulk yet host gapless, topologically protected surface states that can support dissipationless charge transport — surface physics in its purest modern form, with potential applications in quantum computing and advanced electronics.

Topological Materials and Quantum Devices

Published work supported by the laboratory illustrates this frontier. Faxian Xiu's group at Fudan, working with collaborators, observed proximity-induced surface superconductivity in the Dirac semimetal Cd3As2, depositing superconducting niobium on Cd3As2 nanosheets so that superconductivity transferred to the topological material's surface states through the proximity effect — research published in Nature Communications and supported by the laboratory under its Applied Surface Physics rendering. Such experiments pursue topological superconductivity and the Majorana fermions it may host, a material basis proposed for fault-tolerant topological quantum computation.

More recent laboratory-affiliated work includes a zero-field Josephson diode constructed from the antiferromagnetic topological insulator MnBi2Te4, published in Science Advances in 2025, and studies of van der Waals heterostructures combining magnetic topological insulators with conventional superconductors, where emergent superconductivity appears at the interface. Work on thermal metamaterials from laboratory-affiliated physicists extends topological ideas beyond electrons, using convection modulation to realise non-Hermitian topological edge modes in diffusion systems. The common thread is control of states that live at surfaces, edges and interfaces — the laboratory's founding subject, pursued with each generation's materials.

Scanning Probe Microscopy and Nano-Optics

Experimental method development is integral to the laboratory's culture. Shiwei Wu's Microscopy Laboratory for Surfaces and Nanostructures, within the department's surface science community, states its goal plainly: to search for microscopic understanding of important problems in condensed matter physics and surface science by developing and applying state-of-the-art scanning probe and optical techniques. Its problems include the atomic-scale understanding of photophysics, spectroscopy and dynamics in two-dimensional quantum materials, exotic physics in one-dimensional nanostructures, phase transitions in complex oxides and low-dimensional plasmonic structures.

Its techniques include scanning tunnelling microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and near-field and confocal scanning optical microscopy, with projects developing a laser-combined variable-temperature scanning tunnelling microscope in ultrahigh vacuum to study single molecules and nanostructures at surfaces and their response to light — work expected to reveal elementary physical and chemical processes at surfaces and to guide applications in photocatalysis, solar energy harvesting and photonic devices. Development of new scanning probe techniques is treated as research in its own right, combined with theory and collaboration.

People, Teaching and the Department

The laboratory draws its people from one of China's strongest physics departments: the department reports 73 full professors and 17 associate professors with technical staff, six academic disciplines that are each national key disciplines and doctoral training units — condensed matter physics; atomic, molecular and optical physics; theoretical physics; computational physics; particle and nuclear physics; and astrophysics — and a record since 2012 of more than 130 papers in Physical Review Letters alone, alongside papers in the most prominent general science journals. Its courses have received national exquisite and first-class undergraduate course awards, and its faculty lead numerous national research projects.

Xide Xie's educational legacy frames this community. She trained several scientists in the semiconductor field, encouraged teachers and students to study abroad at a time when that was far from routine, and — in an educator's final gesture recorded by Fudan — donated her body to scientific research after her death. The laboratory she proposed remains the department's national platform, and the first director of its academic committee and its early laboratory leadership, including Xun Wang as first director in some accounts, belonged to the generation she had built.

Place Among Fudan's National Laboratories

Fudan lists five national key laboratories, and this laboratory stands alongside the State Key Laboratory of Genetic Engineering and the State Key Laboratory of ASIC and System as one of the university's founding national platforms from the system's early 1990s expansion. Together they mark Fudan's twin strengths in the physical and life sciences. Within physics, the surface laboratory's longevity is notable: approved as China rebuilt its research system after the reform era began, it has remained productive through successive revolutions in its field — from semiconductor surfaces, through nanostructures and spintronics, to topological quantum matter.

Standing and Significance

The State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics matters because it institutionalised, at national level, the insight that modern physics and technology are decided at surfaces and interfaces. Proposed by Xide Xie — textbook author, institute founder and Fudan's president — established from 1990 and opened in December 1992, it gave China a dedicated home for semiconductor surface physics, optoelectronics and ultrathin magnetic films. Three decades on, its affiliated researchers publish on topological insulators, Dirac semimetals, twisted graphene and Josephson devices, using scanning probes Xie could only have anticipated. The continuity is the point: each new material system still poses her generation's question — what happens at the surface, and what can it be made to do?