New Jinan institute to explore scientific frontiers

Shandong Institute of Advanced Technology was founded in Jinan, capital city of East China's Shandong province on Sunday, in an effort to establish a world-leading organization in the frontiers of basic research such as investigation of cosmic rays.

Scientific platforms, including a research center for analyzing the data gathered by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and megascience facilities, will be built at the institute, said Cheng Lin, president of the institute and vice president of Shandong University.

Samuel Chao Chung Ting, 1976 Nobel Prize laureate for physics, was named honorary president of the institute.

"My aims for teaming up with the institute are to find out how the universe began, what is going on in the universe and how human beings can leave the earth to other places," Ting said.

According to the website of NASA, the space agency of the United States, Ting has been leading the AMS project — a large-scale international scientific cooperation project searching space for evidence of dark matter, antimatter, new physics and astrophysics phenomena such as strangelets.

Shandong Institute of Advanced Technology now has six renowned scientists from research organizations, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, the University of Perugia in Italy and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, as well as 10 young scientists working here.