Chapter 367: Tremors In The Financial Market
“We have adopted a structure combining perovskite quantum dots with two-dimensional materials, aiming to have each photon excite more electrons while ensuring that the movement of electrons is not hindered by phonon scattering.”
In the cutting-edge area of the laboratory, there is a thin-film deposition equipment under an ultra-high vacuum environment, as well as a set of the latest laser spectrum analyzers, used for tracking the dynamic behavior of electron-hole pairs.
The experiment began, with the light source emitting ultra-short laser pulses, the energy released per second lasting only at the picosecond level, but the instantaneous intensity sufficient to excite electrons in the material.
The researchers stared intently at the screen, with data showing: the exciton recombination speed was much faster than expected, and energy that might have been lost was now efficiently converted into electric current.
But behind this success, there are still hidden concerns.
Lin Ran said: “The photon transition path still exhibits thermalization phenomena. Although the efficiency is already close to expectations, we still need to further optimize the matching of exciton recombination and electron transport.”
A young scholar leaned over to the screen and pointed at the graph, saying: “Professor Lin, my suggestion is to start with ultrafast spectrum experiments and then examine the movement and scattering issues of excitons.
We need more precise control to ensure that every high-energy photon fully participates in electron generation, avoiding any energy loss.”
After a month, the photoelectric conversion efficiency of the material stably reached 52%.
Although this achievement does not yet have industrialization conditions, it has proven that the leap from mathematical theory to single-chip devices is feasible.
The next step is from laboratory single-chip devices to industrial mass production.
How to transform laboratory single-chip devices into stable, large-scale production photovoltaic modules is the biggest difficult problem.
“We need to ensure that these photovoltaic modules can stably operate for at least 25 years in extreme environments, on the basis of low cost and large-scale production. This is our next challenge.”
“Large-scale production of materials is the first step. Our quantum dot thin films can be manufactured over large areas via solution deposition, but we must ensure consistent material performance in each batch.
Stability and weather resistance are factors we must consider.
Especially the stability issue of perovskite materials; only by solving it can we enter the next stage.”
Every production link is precisely designed under the guidance of numbers: temperature, humidity, illumination, thermal cycle tests; every photovoltaic module needs to undergo at least 5000 hours of weather resistance testing to ensure its 25-year service life.
Although early batches had occasional defects, by continuously adjusting process parameters, the team ultimately successfully overcame these technical bottlenecks.
At the same time, the photoelectric conversion efficiency remained above 50%, and repeatability was greatly improved.
“I always thought Professor Lin wanted to follow Musk’s path, starting from aerospace and artificial intelligence. One day, if I saw on the news that Professor Lin acquired Weibo, I wouldn’t find it strange; I would just feel that this matter finally happened.”
The work intensity of these young workhorses is very high. Whether you have a title or not, whether you have taken the first step from youth to scholar and obtained a permanent iron rice bowl, everyone here is treated equally as workhorses, striving for the same goal.
“But the result was completely unexpected: Deep Red was just a smokescreen, or rather, in the professor’s work sequence, the breakthrough in photoelectric conversion is more important than artificial intelligence.”
After returning to the dormitory in the evening, Jiang Tailiang sighed.
Deep Red’s progress is similar to GPT, showing stronger characteristics than GPT, better answers, and lower hallucination.
Stronger than GPT, and in the domestic market, it is truly far ahead, in the real sense.
The existence of Deep Red has caused Nvidia, which originally could still sell customized downclocked graphics cards domestically, to now not even allow sales of such graphics cards.
Just to lock the development ceiling of China’s artificial intelligence.
China’s moon ultra-low temperature superconducting chip is the solution, but that is after all the future. America is for the present; now GPT urgently needs to win, and for America’s capital market to continue telling this story, they need the present.
As for sacrificing Nvidia’s interests, sacrifice them if necessary.
So from the outside, Lin Ran has always been busy with two things: aerospace and artificial intelligence.
In aerospace, Musk is ahead, Lin Ran behind.
In artificial intelligence, Lin Ran is ahead, Musk’s XAI behind.
Only the young workhorses in seclusion here know how meaningful what they are doing is, and how Lin Ran managed to draw the entire map from scratch.
Any breakthrough in a key node casually demonstrates masterful strokes in mathematical modeling and physics characteristics.
To put it this way, just the knowledge they have access to here is enough to dominate Science for the next twenty years.
This is also why Jiang Tailiang says this; he feels that Lin Ran’s energy in photoelectric conversion far exceeds that in artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has domestic manufacturers, foreign OpenAI, Google, and META as references, so the feeling of standing out is not strong.
Photovoltaics is different.
It often involves solving fundamental problems that limit photoelectric conversion efficiency.
The fact that the Shockley-Queisser limit has existed for over 60 years proves its difficulty to breakthrough.
Relying solely on experiments to find a solution is no less difficult than finding a needle in a haystack.
“Whether Musk or Bill Gates, haven’t they always said that in the artificial intelligence era, energy is key?
The photovoltaic breakthrough may also be laying the foundation for artificial intelligence.
Just like the professor’s moon base, who could have thought before of using the moon’s ultra-low temperature to build a superconducting semiconductor computing center on the moon.
Is it possible that photovoltaics is for artificial intelligence, and aerospace is also for artificial intelligence?”
Whether it is for artificial intelligence, no one knows.
The real situation may just be that photovoltaic technology is the easiest to breakthrough among all existing technologies, and the one that can most easily change the world pattern after breakthrough.
Brain-computer interface is not yet mature, artificial intelligence needs breakthroughs in underlying semiconductor materials, room temperature superconductivity is too fantastical, and only photovoltaics can be deconstructed into mathematical problems and cracked by brute force.
Spring in New York has not fully thawed, the cold and New Year’s atmosphere have not completely dissipated, but the market atmosphere is another scene.
Jack Stewart is a trader at Goldman Sachs. Though just a small trader, he fought his way from Ivy League to secure a workstation on Wall Street with a view of New York’s landmark buildings.
He sat at the trading desk as usual, with the computer screen displaying real-time data from global financial markets.
Suddenly, the crude oil price showed abnormal fluctuations; a small jump made Jack Stewart’s heart skip a beat.
“What’s going on?” he muttered to himself, quickly sliding the mouse to switch to multiple market data screens.
The crude oil price jumped from 76.90 US dollars per barrel to 77.40 US dollars per barrel within ten minutes, then quickly fell back to 76.80 US dollars.
Such fluctuations are usually triggered by geopolitical conflicts or sudden market news, but now there is no major public news.
The news information on the screen is sparse, only some general “inventory data” and “America oil production” updates.
Jack Stewart rubbed his temples, pondering the real cause of this abnormal fluctuation.
Suddenly, a few unfamiliar names flashed in his mind: China, photovoltaics, short selling crude oil.
Jack Stewart is a Reddit enthusiast; it’s already rare for an elite white person like him to like browsing Reddit.
Even rarer, he not only likes browsing Reddit but also the sections related to China, though he himself has never set foot on Chinese soil.
Jack recalled recently stumbling upon posts on Reddit from three American students in China, saying their professor had disappeared for a long time.
He found this very interesting; huge changes are happening in China, and any small change could cause intense market reactions.
China’s breakthroughs in aerospace and artificial intelligence have become the focus of hype by American television stations.
Despite the background of big T trying to make a comeback, arguing how strong China is also a way to argue how bad this White House administration is.
But more importantly, the seeds of innovation and the idea of technology supremacy that China has sown consistently for decades are beginning to bear fruit.
This made Jack, who was already following China, pay even more attention. He specifically private messaged every Chinese student who mentioned this, asking who their professor was and if they could send him a Google Scholar page.
Two of them sent it; after looking, his impression was that the key fields of these two were both related to photovoltaics.
This recent memory, if not for the current crude oil price fluctuation, wouldn’t have come to Jack’s mind and would gradually sink into the sea of memory with time, never to be found again.
But now, he remembered it. Jack quickly connected it to the crude oil price fluctuation on the screen: “Yes, my intuition tells me these two may be related; something bigger might be happening behind this.”
He quickly switched to a freshly released Goldman Sachs “Global Energy Market Report”; the content on the latest dynamics of China’s photovoltaic industry had nothing particularly noteworthy.
Whether production capacity, technology, planning, or financial subsidies, it was no different from what he knew before.
Jack Stewart mobilized small position funds to buy a large number of crude oil put options and sold all the oil price-related ETF funds in his hands.
After completing this operation, he received a call from his boss: “Now, immediately buy crude oil put options entirely, and sell all oil price-related assets in hand!”
The boss only gives orders and never explains why.
Jack Stewart knew his operation was correct.
If he got the news, it means the entire trading hall would soon get it, and he had already jumped ahead a small step; this small step is enough to exchange for good revenue.
Sure enough, after he completed the operation, a report from the global energy research institution (IEA) was frantically forwarded in the Line group by other traders, titled: “China Photovoltaic Technology Breakthrough: 50% Photoelectric Conversion Rate Progress”.
This news is not fully public and seems to have been leaked through internal channels, followed by China’s official energy forum also exposing this message.
At the international energy forum held by Chinese officials in Yangcheng, it was officially announced that a breakthrough has been achieved in photovoltaic technology, with photoelectric conversion efficiency expected to reach 60%. Related papers will also be published in the latest Nature special issue. Photovoltaic modules under the new technology are expected to achieve mass production in 2024, and this achievement will completely change the global energy market pattern.
The sudden outbreak of this news instantly triggered turmoil in the global energy market.
The global energy market reacted violently, with crude oil futures prices dropping 2 US dollars within 30 minutes, and oil price fluctuations exceeding the average level of the past few months.
The American energy futures trading market saw an unprecedented short-selling tide, with the downward trend in oil prices becoming increasingly obvious.
Amid the market’s intense reaction, crude oil futures prices fell over 4% within a short hour, breaking below 73 US dollars per barrel.
As the news gradually spread, global energy fund managers and traders began to follow up on the impact brought by China’s photovoltaic breakthrough.
Panic sentiment in the global capital market became increasingly evident.
Petroleum stocks’ market capitalization saw huge drops in the following week, especially large oil companies like Saudi Aramco and Shell that rely on heavy oil exports, with stock prices plummeting nearly 15%.
Meanwhile, China-related photovoltaic stocks such as Longi and Tongwei saw crazy rises in the stock market, with stock prices surging over 20% in just a few days.
China’s financial team successfully achieved fund reallocation in the photovoltaic field through capital market fund movements, and ruthlessly reaped Americans in the crude oil market.
“This time, we’ve probably recovered the losses from Crude Oil Treasure with interest, right?”
In that 2020 Crude Oil Treasure incident, China Bank lost 31.5 billion RMB including principal and interest.
“Still, information gap is key. Trading with an information gap is refreshing; following the national team’s information, you don’t even need to think much.”
“This year alone, our bank can have over 40 billion in profits on the books. I wonder how much the entire national team fished from the capital market.”
“Actually, thinking about it, it’s still quite a pit. The Crude Oil Treasure that old Wu mentioned earlier lost investors’ money back then; now we’re operating with the bank’s own funds, and the profits won’t compensate the investors from back then.”
“Otherwise? Retail investors in the financial market are destined to be reaped; it’s just a matter of who reaps them.”
The dialogue at China Bank is just the tip of the iceberg of the gains on this financial battlefield for China this time.
Jack Stewart at most got a bit of crumbs from this cake.
After a short-term plunge, the global crude oil market entered a period of volatility consolidation.
Crude oil prices found a new equilibrium point amid drastic changes in global supply-demand relations.
But everyone knows that as the commercialization process of the new photovoltaic technology accelerates, petroleum demand expectations continue to decline, and once the global energy supply chain structure is rewritten, it will never come back.
Because the one achieving the technological breakthrough is China, not other countries.
In the hands of industrial Cthulhu, the power it can unleash is far beyond what other countries can compare.
