News on China's scientific and technological development.

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China will soon surpass Japan to be the biggest consumer of IT products and services in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a new report.

China's expenditure on IT is gradually approaching Japan's, and it will hit $173 billion in 2013, about 4 percent higher than Japan, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC).

In the report, published on May 17, the IDC attributes China's growth in IT consumption to increasing consumer need and government support for the sector.

Wu Lianfeng, assistant vice president of IDC China, said,. driven by the popularity of intelligent terminals such as the latest mobile phones and tablet computers, China's personal consumption of IT products in 2012 will increase by 29.8 percent year on year

The growing need for terminals will inspire enterprises to develop more advanced IT, according to Wu.

IDC China General Manager Huo Jinjie added that the central government will promote informatization levels during the following five years, which will bring more opportunities for the development of the IT market.

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China will invest more than 2 trillion yuan ($316 billion) in promoting energy-saving and low-carbon projects during the 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-15), Xie Zhenhua, vice-minister of the National Development and Reform Commission, said.

The country has set a goal of reducing its energy intensity by 16 percent and carbon intensity by 17 percent during the same period.

The government will allocate targets of energy-saving and carbon-reduction to regions and key industries after considering regional disparities in resources, development level and industrial structure.

An evaluation and surveillance system will be built and efforts in promoting energy-conservation and emission-reduction will be adopted as a crucial tool for assessing local government performance, said Xie.

Meanwhile, the country will step up efforts in eliminating outdated capacity in energy-guzzling industries, including electricity, iron and steel, electrolytic aluminum and cement, while it will further boost the service industry and strategic emerging industries.

The strategic industries include alternative energy, biotechnology, new-generation information technology, high-end equipment manufacturing, advanced materials, alternative-fuel cars and energy-saving and environmentally friendly technologies.

The share of services in GDP will increase to 47 percent by 2015 from the current level of 43 percent and the share of the emerging industries was targeted to reach 8 percent during the same period, among which the energy-saving and environmentally friendly industry will reach 2 percent.

Buildings and transportation also contribute to a large portion of the country's total carbon dioxide emissions. The country will accelerate efforts in building a green construction and transportation system, Xie said.

The country will build 100 demonstration sustainable development cities and 1,000 demonstration companies and industrial parks.

Price and tax policies and fiscal measures will be adopted to encourage the industry and a mechanism for ecological compensation will be created, he added.

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CHINA is making steady gains in the world of scholarly scientific publishing according to the latest Nature journals analysis and by 2014 may be second only to the US in influence in science publishing.

According to the Nature Publishing Index 2011 China, published today as a supplement to Nature, China published more than six per cent of scientific papers.

Papers with authors from China represented 6.6 per cent, or 225 of the 3425 papers published in the 18 Nature-branded primary research journals 2011, up from 5.3 per cent, or 152 papers in 2010. This compares to 12 papers in Nature journals in 2000.

Importantly, China now publishes more than 10 per cent of the world's most cited scientific research. It increased its share of the top one per cent of highly cited scientific articles from 1.85 per cent - 127 of 6874 articles - in 2001 to 11.3 per cent (1158 out of 10,238 articles) in 2011, and now ranks fourth globally.

"By 2014, China could surpass Germany and the UK, who currently hold second and third places,'' Nature China editor Felix Cheung said.

The US share of highly influential research dropped from 64.3 per cent - 4420 out of 6874 articles - in 2001, to 50.7 per cent (5190 out of 10,238 articles) in 2011.

The analysis noted of the 225 Chinese papers published in 2011, 48 were published in Nature Communications which launched in April 2010.

Within China, the top performer was the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was followed by: the University of Science and Technology of China, Peking University, Tsinghua University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Xiamen University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Hong Kong, Nanjing University and BGI Shenzhen.

"People generally consider Peking and Tsinghua University as the big two in China,'' Mr Cheung said in a statement. "Although the USTC has yet to earn the same level of fame as Peking and Tsinghua University, the reality is that all three institutions are in the same league when it comes to publishing high-quality research.''

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The fundamental reason why trade deficit of the machine tool industry continues to expand is that China's machine tool industry has yet to shake off the development pattern that is largely characterized by scale expansion. With contradiction between the quickened upgrade of the demand structure in the domestic market and the supply capability of the industry, it's necessary for the industry to take faster steps towards the high-end market.

According to statistics published by China Machine Tool & Tool Builders' Association recently, in 2011, China imported US$20.29 billion of machine tool products, an increase of 29.3 percent over the previous year; China exported US$8.9 billion machine tool products, an increase of 26.4 percent year on year.

These foreign trade numbers of machine tool industry show two things: first, with international markets recovering to various extents and emerging markets' demands for China's machine tool products going up, the export of China's machine tool products goes back up encouragingly, creating a new high record since 2008; second, China's import of machine tool products continues to grow at a rapid pace, import volume continues to increase, which is also at historic high, and export and import deficit of the machine tool industry has been broadening for the past 3 years.

China is a large producer of machine tools, but foreign trade of the machine tool industry has always been in deficit. In 2001, the trade deficit of the machine tool industry grew bigger, the basic cause being the significant increase of import, with both the growth rate and the base volume of import bigger than those of export. China imports mainly medium- to high-end metal-cutting machine tools and molding tools that have rather high added value, but what China exports most are tools, props, grinding tools and abrasives; a large part of these exports are low-priced and low-end products and raw materials. The price difference between imported products and exported products doesn't help to reduce the deficit, either.

"The fundamental reason why trade deficit of the machine tool industry continues to expand is that China's machine tool industry has yet to shake off the development pattern that is largely characterized by scale expansion", said Wang Liming, vice standing chairman of China Machine Tool & Tool Builders' Association. Mr. Wang points that although the production volume of China's machine tool industry has been large in the past years, the level of its products structure is rather low; it is still at the low end of the global industrial chain, unable to meet medium- and high-end demands in the domestic market; the medium- and high-end markets, particularly the latter, in China is dependent on import, and medium- and high-end numerical control systems and main function parts that are also highly dependent on import; these problems still exist.

The gradual expansion of trade deficit has also resulted in the slipping inclination of the market share of Chinese machine tools in the domestic market, despite that demands in the domestic market have been growing at a faster pace. According to statistics, in 2011, the market share of domestic machine tools was 66.1 percent, 0.8 percent lower than that in the previous year.

"The contradiction between the accelerated upgrade of the structure of market demands and the supply capability of the industry has become the main contradiction that impedes the development of China's machine tool industry", said Wang Liming, who points out that presently users' demands for medium- to high-end products have increased markedly, but the technical level, overall service quality, and other factors of medium- to high-end domestic products are still unable to meet the requirements of the change.

In future market competition, international machine tool tycoons will continue to take advantage of high technology and use medium-end products that are assembled at low cost through high technology to impact the Chinese market. Therefore, China's machine tool industry must make efforts in medium- and high-end machine tools as soon as possible, and take faster steps towards the high-end market. According to the 12th Five-year Plan of the machine tool industry, the targets by 2015 is to enable domestic numerical control machine tools to take up 70 percent of the domestic market, increase the market share of domestic medium- to high-end numerical control systems in the domestic market from 20 percent to 50 percent, and increase the share of medium- to high-end function parts from 5 percent to 20 percent.

So, China's machine tool enterprises should accelerate the reform of development pattern, unswervingly follow the development path that centers on inner strength development and technology advancement, and continue to improve enterprises' comprehensive competitiveness.

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China’s 28th Antarctic expedition has recently returned in triumph.

China’s first polar deep ice radar system, developed by the Key Laboratory of Electromagnetic Radiation and Probing Technology, Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IECAS), was involved in the inland Antarctic scientific investigation. On the way from Kunlun Station to Zhongshan Station, the radar acquired mass under-ice detection data. Through the intense work of laboratory researchers, data processing has been partly completed. This batch of data has high imaging quality, shows clear under-ice layering and ice-rock interface, and will provide a basis for researches on climatic changes in Antarctic and topography and landforms of under-ice related regions. This is also first time for China to acquire detection data from a depth of more than 2,000 meters under ice with an independent ice radar equipment.

The inland under-ice detection experiment is an important part of the “Research on Key Polar Remote Sensing Technology and System Targeting Global Climatic Changes”, a key project under the 863 Program (China's National High-tech R&D Program). As one of the entities involved in the project, IECAS was in charge of developing the deep radar system. The radar, China’s first of its kind, participated in China’s 26th inland Antarctic scientific investigation in 2012 and acquired under-ice detection data in the inland of Grove Mountains. The research has drawn sustained support from the 863 Program. And a further research will provide technical support for China’s massive Antarctic and Arctic scientific investigations.

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Recently in the Key Laboratory of Quantum Information, CAS, the group led by Prof.LI Chuanfeng obtained solid-state quantum memory with a second to none fidelity, which is as high as 99.9%. This reliable quantum memory is a crucial step toward quantum networks based on solid-state devices. Physical Review Letters issued on May 11th published this noteworthy result, and it was also reported by Physics Synopsis.

Faithfully storing an unknown quantum light state is essential to advanced quantum communication and distributed quantum computation applications, currently that role is well played by quantum memory, one of the core devices in quantum information, which is also indispensable in the processes of quantum teleportation, quantum encoding, and reducing information loss, to name a few.

Despite there are some remarkable efforts based on cold atoms single atom in a cavity Bose-Einstein condensate, atomic vapors and trapped ions,they are suffering from several practical drawbacks, such as extra step of spatially splitting the input state, imperfect spatial mode matching and strong control or read light pulse during the memory sequence required.

This quantum memory is based on an atomic frequency comb(AFC) in rare-earth ion-doped crystals, for the crystals have shown several seldom equaled advantages, such as excellent capability to store light for extended periods with high efficiency and a large bandwidth. However, due to the strongly polarization dependent absorption of ions in crystal, all previous experiments have been conducted with a single predefined polarization. To get rid of that limitation,LI’s group uses an alternative approachto realize AFC quantum memory for polarizationencodedsingle photons.

The hardware of this quantum memory is composed of two pieces of Nd3t:YVO4 crystals (a kind of high performance laser crystal) sandwiching a half-wave plate, and this structure helps prevent a single piece of Nd3t:YVO4 crystal from functioning as a polarization-qubit memory. Moreover,the experimental setup has been improved to achieve an optimum polarization storage performance. The group measured the process fidelity for a 200 ns storage time with single-photon-level input pulses at 99.9%±0.2%, which should make the quantum memory suitable for quantum error-correction applications in large-scale quantum computation. Additionally, the results shows bright prospect in producing solid-state devices that are capable of functioning as a quantum memory for light’s polarization, temporal, and spatial information.

This research was supported by the National Basic Research Program and National Natural Science Foundation of China. Key Laboratory of Quantum Information is a laboratory under the guidance of CAS academician GUO Guangcan.

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TD-LTE-Advanced dominated by China was formally identified as one of the two international standards of the fourth-generation mobile communication by International Telecommunication Union in January this year. It started the high-speed era of mobile communication and was expanded rapidly in the whole world. The scale test conducted in 6 cities last year in China made a positive achievement and pilot cities will be further increased this year.

"It still needs 2 or 3 years to issue a 4G license. We would rather slow down to be well-prepared for the purpose that finally users can receive a mature and high-quality product", Miao Yu, minister of Industry and Information Technology. It needs to solve two problems of base station density and immature terminal for the commercialization of TD-LTE. Currently, there are 220,000 base stations for TD-SCDMA network and we will strive for increasing the number of base stations to 400,000 within 3 years so as to step to 4G.
What is 4G?

After 3G license was issued by Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2008, TD-SCDMA began to commercially operate formally. TD-LTE, as a subsequent evolution of TD-SCDMA, possesses characteristics of more advanced technology, higher transmission rate and more economical frequency utilization. The industry terms this evolution as 4G.

Such an evolution is also reflected in the upgrading method from 3G to 4G. It is said that the existing 3G mobile base station can be smoothly transformed to a 4G one through simple equipment upgrading and the users feel nothing during the process of upgrading.

For average users, what is most obvious is that 4G is faster than 3G. During the TD-LTE network test in a bus in Hangzhou, the network speed can reach 80M per second, dozens of times of the current 3G speed. Time delay is significantly improved compared to that in 3G. Under a static state, the downloading speed of TD-LTE is as high as 100M per second, exceeding the speed of normal broadband of traditional fixed network, so as to really solve the trouble of cable and go on line at any time and any site in any way.

4G brings a quicker network speed with usability no worse than the one of 3G and service charge expected to be no more than that of 3G. People do not need to replace the mobile phones with different standards. With additional devices like network converter, you can convert 4G signal into WIFI to receive. And you can convert and receive it through special devices if in the public area or at home. It is said that the charge policy for TD-LTE is not yet formulated.

Just for this, Li Yue, president of China Mobile, says the "TD-LTE" standard created by China will occupy 30 percent share of the global market in 10 years.

What does 4G do?

Passengers in Bus B1 in Hangzhou always use intelligent terminals like smart phones and netbooks to enjoy the high speed surfing on the internet.

Quicker 4G speed makes the high-speed information service applications which are restricted due to low network speed possible, such as simultaneous shooting and transmission of high-resolution video, high-resolution VOD and high-resolution video meeting.

The development of 4G also means a huge market cake. "Once 4G is commercialized in a large scale, it will not only advance the development of communication equipment industry, but also drive forward the related industries in the whole chain, such as network operation, mobile internet, content, service application, etc.", said Chen Shanzhi, vice chairman of Datang Telecom Technology and Industry Group. "As for China, 4G will form a market scale over RMB 1000 billion Yuan during its whole life time".

Earlier during the network construction in 3G era, Chinese domestic manufacturers benefit a lot, and it will be the same in 4G era. As for RAN1 and RAN4 related with the core physical technologies of 4G, the number of papers submitted by Datang Telecom leads the whole industry that allow Datang Telecom situate at a core position in the field of TDD 4G standard. To the end of December, 2011, ZTE (Zhongxing Telecommunications Equipment) has acquired 30 LTE commercial contracts and 6 formal commercial networks and cooperated with over 100 operators all over the world to deploy pilot networks. Such a situation is obviously better than that during 2G and 3G era. The number of basic 4G LTE patents of ZTE has accounted for 7 percent of that of the global communication manufacturers and marched into the leading group of 4G standard.

How far is 4G away?

"Presently, the global end-to-end industrial chain of TD-LTE has been completed. This year, China will further expand the construction, increase the number of pilot cities, strengthen the improvement, enhance user experience, provide large-volume and high-speed LT-LTE network service and appeal for cooperation of the global industrial chain so as to promote the formation of the scale effect globally", said Sha Nansheng, deputy director of Science and Technology Division of MIIT.

It is said that the TD-LTE industrial chain has be recognized and adopted by many domestic and foreign leading operators like China Mobile, Japanese Softbank, Vodafone and Deutsche Telecom. It is expected that more than 10 countries and regions will begin to the process of commercial deployment in 2012 and a several operators has started the pre-commercial network deployment.

China Telecom and China Unicom view that the 4G development is still faced with the problems of technical bottlenecks and deficiency of market demand that needs time to be commercialized in a large scale, but China Mobile has went ahead and is making efforts to realize it.

The TD-LTE scale technical test of China Mobile has entered the second phase in February this year. China Mobile started the TD-LTE scale technical test in 6 cities including Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Xiamen two years ago. To September last year, the work for the first phase had been completed successfully. It achieved expected results and also found a resolution to update base stations at low cost.

It is said that through smooth upgrading and simple equipment replacement, China Mobile can upgrade the 3G base stations into 4G ones in Hangzhou. Thus the existing 3G network facilities can be used to the most, which will save nearly 90 percent of construction work. The construction period for a single base station is reduced from about 2 months to 3 days. Meanwhile, it also saves much investment in network construction. Technically, it makes easier the transformation from 3G to 4G.

The formal identification of TD-LTE technology as 4G international standard sounds the bugle again to speed up 4G commercialization in China. Li Yue said that China Mobile will accelerate LD-LTE development in China so as to speed up 4G development. China Mobile will start the 4G expanded-scale test network construction in 2012 and constructed over 20,000 4G base stations in 9 cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin. TD-LTE updates will be conducted in big cities in Zhejiang and Guangzhou Province so as to achieve complete coverage in the urban area. Meanwhile, China Mobile will carry out pre-commercialization of 4G business in cities like Hangzhou and Shenzhen. After the success of 4G expanded-scale test in 2013, China Mobile will increase the 4G base stations to more than 200,000.

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The Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IHEP) won the bid for the waveguide system of the MAX IV Project on March 22, 2012, marking the landing of IHEP’s accelerator components in northern Europe for the first time.

The successful bid was announced by the MAX-lab, a Swedish national laboratory operated jointly by the Swedish Research Council and Lund University with research focus on accelerator physics, research based on the use of synchrotron radiation, and nuclear physics using energetic electrons.

IHEP was appointed as the official supplier of the components in microwave and vacuum system of the MAX IV Project in 2011. As being invited by the Swedish National Electron Accelerator Laboratory for Synchrotron Radiation Research, Nuclear Physics and Accelerator Physics and the MAX-lab, IHEP joined the international bidding for the waveguide system of the MAX IV Project. After extended review, IHEP ranked the first among the competing candidates and won the final bid.

The MAX IV project will be the next generation synchrotron radiation facility in Sweden. It will replace the existing laboratory consisting of the MAX I, II and III storage rings. The main sources at MAX IV are two storage rings (1.5 GeV and 3 GeV) with state-of-the-art low emittance for the production of soft and hard x-rays.

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