AWARDEE OF PHYSICS PRIZE

WANG SHIJI

Wang Shiji, a nuclear fusion and plasma physicist. Born in Shanghai in 1932, and graduated from the Technical Physics Department at Peking University in 1956. He is now a research fellow at Shanghai Institute of Laser Plasma and National Laboratory on High Power Laser and Physics.
During the early 1960s, Wang developed the neutron scintillation detector containing Cd bulky liquid, and utilized it to measure the parameters of resonance neutron fission with high precision in Joint Institute of Nucleus in the Soviet Union.
In the mid 1960s, he got involved in China's early nuclear tests, and creatively made the optimized design of gas Cerenkov detector to accomplish the measurement of high energy γ-ray under the high background, which has been used to determine the temporal processing of thermonuclear reaction.
In the early 1980s, he directed China's laser fusion experiments, led the development of a series of important diagnosing instruments, and managed several overall experiments. His much initial and creative work has proved to be promotive to the development of the high-power laser technology, and to the establishment of a solid foundation for the projects in related fields in China.
As one of exploiters in China's X-ray laser research, Wang has made significant contributions to the development of world-level X-ray lasers in China since the late 1980s. Combining with the theoretical work, he directed the X-ray lasers experiments. He originally presented and accomplished a series of schemes such as double-target coupling and multi-target chain, which efficiently overcome the deflection of X-ray laser beam in plasma gain media. Especially, he successfully realized long-distance target coupling and thus achieved the spatial wave filtering for the first time. Because of these novel techniques, the out-put quality and efficiency of X-ray lasers have been significantly improved, and the saturation gain X-ray lasers with near-diffraction-limited divergence were obtained on the middle-small scaled laser facility as well. Some of the work has been in the leading position in the world. In addition, he took the lead in achieving X-ray lasers in near-water-window wavelength on the middle-small scaled laser facility by using the technique of focal-line superposition. In the recognition of these outstanding scientific achievements, he was awarded several national prizes. In recent years, he has been to Japan to perform cooperative experiments. In the fruitful cooperation, X-ray lasers of high-gain saturated Ni-like Ag, high intensity Ni-like Yb and Hf in near-water-window wavelength, and Ni-like Ta and W in water-window wavelength have obtained with the technique of uniform focal line and two-target coupling.
Wang was elected the academician of CAS in 1999.