In April, a General-Purpose Powder Diffractometer (GPPD) user experiment was published in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07194-6). This work was carried out by a domestic research team consisting of CAS Academician Yu Jihong and Professor Chen Feijian from Jilin University, Professor Wu Peng from East China Normal University, and Dr. Li Jian from Nanjing University. They collaborated with Professor Miguel A. Camblor from the Materials Research Institute in Madrid, Spain, to successfully synthesize a three-dimensional stable super-large-pore molecular sieve ZEO-5 with a 20 × 16 × 16-element channel system using the chain extension method. This achievement once again broke the record for the pore size of stable fully-connected super-large-pore molecular sieves. The team adopted a research method which combines neutron diffraction, three-dimensional electron diffraction, synchrotron powder X-ray diffraction, aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy, and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance technology to determine the detailed structure of the zeolite three-dimensional stable super-large molecular sieve.

In July, another user experiment result from GPPD was published in Science (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp0559). This work was completed by a research team led by Dr. Chen Kexin from Beijing University of Science and Technology in collaboration with Professor Wang Jinshu's team from Beijing University of Technology and Professor Huang Mingxin's team from the University of Hong Kong. They achieved, for the first time, room-temperature large deformation tensile plasticity in ceramics. This research was conducted to quantitatively obtain the dislocation density of ceramics using neutron diffraction data and proposed a groundbreaking strategy of "borrowing dislocations" from metals, enabling ceramics to exhibit tensile plasticity similar to metals.

The GPPD research group