AWARDEE OF CHEMISTRY PRIZE

SHA GUOHE

Sha Guohe, a physical chemist,was born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province in 1934 and graduated from the University of Petroleum (Beijing) in 1956. He has been working in Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences since 1957. Now, he is a research fellow of National State Key Laboratory of Molecular Reaction Dynamics at this institute. In 1984-1986, he worked as a guest professor at Max-Planck Institute for Quantenoptik of Germany.
In the early and mid 1960s, his scientific activities were in the fields of combustion and detonation. He and his coworkers built a shock tube for the study of high-temperature chemical reaction dynamics and studied the 3-dimensional structure of gas detonation and found the relationship between the wave oscillation frequency and chemical reaction rate. In the late 1960s, he engaged in the research of material for microwave absorption. A series of new type microwave absorbers were developed in his lab and massively produced in a factory, which were used in the construction of several tens of Microwave-Black Room in China in the past thirty years.
In 1970s, he worked on the research and development of chemical lasers. Because of the enormous chemical energy deposit, chemical laser has a very high output power potential. He and his coworkers successfully made two types of hydrogen fluoride chemical laser, one is continuous wave driven by combustion and another is pulsed wave initiated by an electron beam. Both lasers were of the first in China. By using the high power laser, he studied laser-target interaction and measured the propagation velocity of laser-supported detonation wave as well as the plasma formation threshold and its shield effect to the target. Based on these studies, he had presented a proposal which was very helpful for high power chemical laser research in China.
Since 1980s, he has been engaged in the research of laser chemistry and molecular dynamics. An ultrasensitive laser spectroscopic technique—the Optical-Optical Double Resonance Multiphoton Ionization was developed in his laboratory for the study of molecular spectroscopy and collisional energy transfer of excited states. He and his coworkers obtained the first rotationally resolved spectra of ammonia predissociating state () of a very short (~100 fs) lifetime. He discovered a dual mechanism in intermolecular electronic energy transfer of carbon monoxide, i.e. a near-resonant long-range dipole-dipole interaction and a long-lived exciplex formation. For some subrotational processes, several new propensity rules were found. His most important finding in this respect was the Collisional Quantum Interference (CQI) effect in collision induced singlet-triplet mixed state radiationless transitions. Being different from the usual interference phenomena of light, CQI is a sort of matter wave interference. He derived a formula to express CQI and got its first experimental evidence. This discovery was selected as one of the “Ten top science news in China” of Year 2000.
Sha has won eight awards including 2nd class Prize of National Natural Science of 1999 and the 1st class Prize for Natural Science of CAS in 1997, 2nd class Prize issued by the Commission of Science and Technology for National Defense in 1980. He was elected the academician of CAS in 1997.