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"Studying" at NIMTE
Hi everyone! I’m Matthew, and I’m going to be a senior this year. This summer I spent three weeks at the Ningbo Institute of Material Technology and Engineering with the intention of learning about graphene and other 2D materials, but I ended up learning more about the mathematics of patterns and getting distracted by some other endeavors. I would’ve liked to have written this blog while I was there, but alas, there is no access to Google Sites in China. Here’s what I remember from the trip, reconstructed from pictures and poorly-organized journal entries.
Friday July 1. My dad and I arrived at the Ningbo Lishe International Airport and took a cab to the institute. I met my professor he showed me around the campus, including his office, the cafeteria, and my new apartment. I also bought some snacks and some origami paper at a nearby convenience store.
In addition to the acronym NIMTE, this place also goes by CNITECH.
My apartment building.
In this poorly composed photo you see from left to right the busts of three great scientists: Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
July 2-3. I wasn’t going to start any research until the beginning of next week, so over the weekend we visited some interesting places in Ningbo, including Tian Yi Ge, the oldest still-existing library in China.
Fan Qin, the library's founder.
Books!
Apparently this was also the place where Mahjong was invented.
Monday July 4. My dad left to go visit friends and relatives in other cities and I went to a meeting with the professor and two of his graduate students. They presented some cool pictures of graphene taken with an electron microscope and talked about their ongoing experiments. Something about how applying heat to graphene affects its structure.
An image of some graphene the students made.
The students pull up a paper discussing how a certain method of graphene synthesis produces structural defects such as oxygen functional groups.
The Chinese character for "oxygen" is the character meaning "goat" written underneath the character meaning "air."
The goal set out by my professor was to describe the symmetry of various 2D materials. I went to my new office and did some background reading on these mathematical objects called groups: more specifically, wallpaper groups. I didn't do anything to celebrate the 4th of July.
There are many like it, but this cubicle is mine.
A book I found on my desk entitled Transmission Electron Microscopy: A Textbook for Materials Science.
Tuesday July 5. Today's readings were pamphlets number 13 and 14 from the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr), which featured drawings of stick figures holding hands in weird positions to illustrate different kinds of symmetry. They were rather confusing reads because they used some notation I was totally unfamiliar with. In my free time I explored some of the labs near my office and looked for a good way to use my origami paper.
Symmetry and Space Group Patterns.
A 3D printer. (I don't like how the "3" in this font descends below the baseline.)
Not exactly sure what this is...
The beginnings of a side project.
Wednesday July 6. More reading today. (I soon discover that most days involve a lot of reading.) I also visited the lab where I later did some work with graphite solutions. There are a lot of cool posters on display with all the research that's being done here.
Lots of flasks and vials and stuff.
I passed by this bulletin board showing Tu Youyou, the first Chinese woman to win the Nobel Prize. She won her prize for isolating a compound in Artemisia plants that treats malaria. Her name comes from classic Chinese poetry, and it refers to the sound of a bleating goat (coincidentally) eating Artemisia plants.
Are these tiny granules of graphene? I have no idea.
Ooh. "Sensitive sensors."
I guess at this point I'll very briefly describe what it is I was actually reading about, wallpaper groups. Here's a nice design that comes from (a Wikipedia article that tells me it comes from) the ceiling of an Egyptian tomb:
This particular image doesn't show a lot of the pattern, but if you imagine it extending across the entire plane, then it would have some certain symmetries. It would have 90 degree rotational symmetry (otherwise known as four-fold symmetry) about the centers of each swirly thing, 180 degree (two-fold) symmetry about the centers of each flower, and two-fold symmetry about the points in between green triangles. In total, it has one type of four-fold center and two types of two-fold centers. This next pattern, the Pythagorean tiling, has the same set of symmetries, which I will leave for you to find:
Since they both have the same symmetries, these two patterns belong to the same wallpaper group, specifically group p4. My task is to figure out what wallpaper groups graphene and molybdenum disulfide and other 2D materials fall into.
In my free time I listened to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and figured out that it's not possible to color the faces of a dodecahedron with only three colors such that no two adjacent faces are the same color.
Thursday July 7. Today I started looking into this weird notation that's used to describe crystal structures and also played around with some computer simulations. I also learned that it's possible to cut up a polygon into a finite number of pieces and rearrange it into any other polygon of the same area.
Lots of charts and diagrams.
The crystal structure of molybdenum disulfide.
A nice green circle at the entrance of the institute.
In my free time I made a color-coded plan for my dodecahedron.
Friday July 8. While looking around for an interesting topic on which to write a paper I remembered aperiodic tilings, these weird patterns that almost repeat, but not quite. The Penrose tilings are an example. Any finite patch of a Penrose tiling shows up infinitely times within the pattern, but as a whole it lacks translational symmetry.
Such patterns were considered purely mathematical curiosities until 1982, when Dan Shechtman made some weird observations of certain aluminum-manganese alloys. He found they produced electron diffraction patterns like this:
What he found had ten-fold symmetry, which is impossible in a crystal. Soon it was found that the diffraction pattern is aperiodic, and these new structures were named quasicrystals. Shechtman won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, which the Nobel Committee said "forced scientists to reconsider their perception of the very nature of matter." The exact structure of quasicrystals is still a mystery.
Dan Shechtman also ran for President of Israel in 2014. Opinion polls put him in second place, but he received only one vote out of the 119 cast by the Knesset. The press dubbed him the quasi-president.
In my free time I marveled at the size of the clouds and drank some Fanta.
Maybe the clouds just appear bigger because they're close to the horizon.
And who better to advertise an orange soft drink than a teenage Chinese boy band with cat ears?
Saturday July 9. Nothing really interesting happened.
Sunday July 10. In the morning we had another group meeting, this time in a lab. Both I and the professor's other students were rather behind in our work. On the bright side, I finished my spiked pentakis dodecahedron!
Graphene coating the inside of a glass tube as a product of chemical vapor deposition.
I guess these chambers are slightly pressurized.
Even at a top-notch government research institute you will find piles of dirty equipment.
So many papers to read. That one on the top right is a repeating pattern of feet.
Monday July 11. My reverse birthday. I did little work today because I got distracted thinking about how you might make an origami pentagonal bipyramid. I also walked around a lot.
Someone left a USB fan on my desk, which was nice because it was really hot.
This building has one of those cool glass walkways that bridge the gap between two sides.
Professor Einstein's view of the place.
Tuesday July 12. The only picture I have from this day shows my desk cluttered full of folded ideas, so I guess that’s all I did.
My first idea for a pentagonal bipyramid (the purple thing) turned out kinda flimsy.
Wednesday July 13. Today I started doing some research on the tessellations of M. C. Escher, seeing if I could use some of his artwork to demonstrate symmetry concepts. In my free time I walked around the campus and came up with a better way to make a pentagonal bipyramid, but it still isn’t sturdy enough to whole its shape on its own. During my nighttime walk I noticed some bats flying around, just like the bats I occasionally see in my backyard at home.
"I don't grow up. In me is the small child of my early days."
What's that pink goo stuck to the edge of the pond?
There are so many butterflies flying around, but now and then I see them not flying around.
I got so distracted...
It's like a clamshell.
Can't figure out how to tuck in these flaps.
Thursday July 14. More exploring these big empty buildings. I got really caught up in origami.
A peek inside the "Super Computer Server Room."
I wonder how old this place is?
A poorly done panorama photo of a well done panorama photo.
"Edison's Corner."
The obligatory "wall where we put the name of our institution in a big, bold font across a world map to show that we like international collaboration" wall.
The even more obligatory "wall where we write a word that embodies one of our core values multiple times in many different languages to show that we like international collaboration" wall.
I think this garden used to be full of roses.
"I'll just do a little bit more origami..."
some hours later
Friday July 15. Today I did actual research! By which I mean, I repeatedly centrifuged some cloudy gray liquid to obtain a dusty gray powder. Apparently that's the first step to making graphene. The next step involves baking the powder for a long time. I think. Or maybe treating it with acid? Honestly my Chinese wasn’t good enough for me to really figure it out. In my free time I went butterfly-watching and perfected my paper pentagonal (bi)pyramid prowess.
Everything looks like a milk carton. Okay not really.
A centrifuge works basically like a microwave. A giant, noisy, trembling microwave that could blow up if you don't put your hot pocket in the *exact center* of the plate.
Not sure if this is tasty roasted seaweed, or just graphene oxide.
There's a chemical whose actual name is "Tween 20." Huh.
I have cool keys.
The view from the room on my floor that has these open walls with slats because it's the room where everyone hangs up their clothes so the air can flow around from outside to dry the clothes better. Yeah.
Can you spot the butterfly in this picture?
The whole family.
bunny!
Saturday July 16. I explored the upper levels of the new building and begun mass production of pentagonal bipyramids. I also relistened to David Foster Wallace’s speech “This Is Water” and pondered the meaning of Ecclesiastes 1.
Poor bird.
My journal entry for today reads, "Maybe in the future I'll have a glass jar just full of little pentagonal bipyramids."
View from one of the upper levels.
Every room on this floor was completely empty, save for the yoga studio.
Not exactly sure why I took a picture of this...
More stuff coming soon!
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