168: Chapter 168: All the Academicians are deployed, and the atomic building blocks encounter a quantum dead loop!

Alien civilization navigation timer, Day 49.

Pangu Laboratory, Level B2, 10:00 AM.

The line count in the code repository had been pushed from zero to 4,300.

Su Che had been sitting in front of the main console for two full days, and the creases on the back of his hoodie looked like a washboard.

The control framework for the underlying architecture of the Sub-nanometer chip was beginning to take shape.

The kinematic model for manipulating a single atom using a quantum field had passed its first round of theoretical calculations, but it was still far from being usable.

There were four people in total working on this line with him.

Zhao Mingyuan occupied the second workstation on the left.

At forty-seven years old, specializing in automatic control, he was the youngest academician in the fifty-six-person team, besides Su Che himself.

Back when they were working on the 10,000-ton verification version, he had written seventy percent of the code for the cluster cooperative scheduling algorithm of the seventy-two engines.

After the power module was finished, Su Che had pinned him to the lithography line and hadn't let him take a single step away.

The other three were algorithm engineers, the type who kept their heads down and typed away, speaking little and doing much.

The 2,000-square-meter underground hall was much quieter than it had been a month and a half ago.

Lin Waner walked in from the side door, carrying two bowls of noodles.

She placed the hot dry noodles on Su Che's desk and sent the beef noodles to Zhao Mingyuan's workstation.

"Where did you arrange for that previous batch of academicians to go?"

Lin Waner unpacked the chopsticks and handed them over, "Last time, fifty-six people were packed in here like a subway during rush hour, but now you could play badminton in here."

Su Che took a mouthful of noodles, the sesame paste seasoned just right.

"They were dispatched a long time ago."

From the day the 10,000-ton verification version was completed, the fifty-two academicians had been broken up according to their professional fields and inserted into the key bottlenecks of the entire R&D industrial chain.

Zhou Dehai, in electronics, had taken six people to be stationed at Kaitian Base.

He was handling the atomic reconstruction production scheduling for the Candle Dragon and the processing scheduling and factory quality inspection for all structural components of the 100,000-ton luan bird single-handedly.

Last month, he sent over a daily report that included the sentence: "The Candle Dragon is on three shifts, and I'm on four."

Academician Sun Qiwen, in thermodynamics and energy engineering, had taken eight people to stay at Jiuquan Launch Base.

The loading and configuration of the luan bird verification ship, checking launch parameters, and calculating orbital rendezvous windows were all his work.

After thirty-some sorties, he had lost a significant amount of weight.

Academician Zhang Weide, in aerospace structural mechanics, had led five people to be stationed at Wenchang Launch Base.

The southern launch site was responsible for launching heavy lunar components, and he was there monitoring the trim and center of gravity.

The remaining thirty were scattered across eleven research institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and seven national defense laboratories.

Some were mass-producing spare parts for space infrastructure robots, some were purifying precursor materials for the Sub-nanometer chip, and others were cooperating with the military to upgrade the Quantum Communication backbone network.

Everyone's work progress was regularly summarized to Su Che's encrypted terminal.

Nineteen nodes, fifty-two screws, all quietly interlocking and operating with Pangu Laboratory as the hub.

"Out of fifty-six academicians, fifty-two are being used as outsourced labor."

Zhao Mingyuan finished his beef noodles and pushed the bowl aside, "My advisor used to say that coordinating three professors was a miracle of management, but Su Che has managed to handle fifty-six all at once."

"Your advisor didn't have 100,000 tons of engineering volume under his hands." Su Che set his noodle bowl on an empty spot and returned his fingers to the keyboard.

Zhao Mingyuan didn't say anything else.

Qin Lan walked over from the entrance, carrying a stack of coordination letters.

"Kaitian Base, Academician Zhou Dehai is asking for instructions."

She opened the first letter, "The Candle Dragon's production queue is full, and the structural components for the 100,000-ton luan bird are clashing with the beryllium-copper alloy vacuum chamber for the lunar energy station. How should we set the priority?"

"Structural components first, vacuum chamber third; as long as it doesn't affect the assembly rhythm of the Dry Dock, it'll be fine." Su Che replied quickly.

She flipped to the second one.

"Jiuquan Launch Base, Academician Sun Qiwen, 4,200 tons of prefabricated components for the verification ship were sent up yesterday, and the next batch is scheduled for 4:00 AM tomorrow."

Su Che acknowledged this and switched back to the code repository.

Building blocks at the atomic level—the theory was there, but the engineering was full of pitfalls.

The spatial resolution of quantum field manipulation was the biggest obstacle right now.

Traditional robotic arm positioning accuracy was at the micron level, and the top-tier ones reached the nanometer level.

But an atom's diameter is between 0.1 and 0.3 nanometers.

To place a single atom at a designated coordinate, the positioning accuracy had to be at the picometer level.

Picometer, one-thousandth of a nanometer.

Su Che had built a minimalist virtual platform in the background of the Mirror World.

A substrate of 10 nanometers square, a simulated quantum field generator, and a virtual silicon atom.

The task was laughably simple: strip a silicon atom from the generator's beam, hold it with the quantum field, and move it to the designated coordinate on the substrate surface.

He ran the first version of the control script.

Atomic separation, manipulation, movement, placement.

It was off by 120 picometers.

For a 3-nanometer job, this error was negligible.

But at the sub-nanometer level, 120 picometers was equivalent to building a brick in your neighbor's living room.

Su Che played back the feedback data frame by frame.

The deviation was occurring at the edge gradient of the quantum field.

The clamping force at the center of the field was uniform, but the closer it got to the edge, the faster the field strength decayed.

When the atom passed through the edge region, it took an asymmetric lateral thrust, and the trajectory drifted.

"Edge effect." Zhao Mingyuan leaned over from the side and glanced at the playback screen, "It's the same problem I encountered when I was messing with ion traps back in the day."

"How did you handle it?"

"Added compensation electrodes; placed auxiliary electrodes around the trap body to correct the non-uniform field."

Zhao Mingyuan drew a circle in the air with his finger, "To move it to the quantum field, that means inserting a set of auxiliary field sources around the main generator for real-time correction."

Su Che added four virtual auxiliary sources to the script, distributed symmetrically around the four positions of the main generator, and used linear superposition for the compensation algorithm first.

Run.

The placement deviation shrank to 11 picometers.

It was an order of magnitude better, but far from enough.

He switched to a third-order polynomial fit, 9.4 picometers.

Fourth order, 7.1.

Fifth order, 6.8; the gains had plateaued.

Zhao Mingyuan leaned over from his workstation and glanced at the data.

"Static compensation has reached its limit."

His index finger traced the curve on the screen that was tending toward flatness,

"Of the remaining 6.8 picometers, at least half is the quantum fluctuation of the atom itself—zero-point energy vibration; it won't stop even if you lower the temperature to absolute zero."

Quantum fluctuation, the insurmountable wall of physics.

Su Che pulled up the "Real-time Calibration Technology for Atomic-Level Precision" document provided by the system.

There was a very critical paragraph: use the atom's own quantum state information as feedback signal to complete the placement calibration within the last ten femtoseconds of the deposition action.

Ten femtoseconds, ten to the power of negative fourteen seconds.

To run a complete closed-loop calibration in such a narrow window, the computing speed of a 3-nanometer chip was not enough.

Only a Sub-nanometer chip would work.

Su Che saved the code and pushed himself up from the chair.

A literal deadlock: to build a Sub-nanometer chip, you first need a Sub-nanometer lithography machine, but the ultimate precision of the lithography machine depends on the Sub-nanometer chip for calibration.

"Leave the calibration module blank." Su Che encapsulated and archived the fifth-order compensation algorithm, "Continue building the control flow of the underlying architecture; we'll install this final lock once the chip is out."

Zhao Mingyuan had no objections and switched back to his own terminal.

This happened often in engineering; build the building first, and install the door locks last.

Su Che walked to the other side of the hall.

Liu Huaqiang was circling a long table, and the workstation area for ten people was piled high with drawings and samples.

"The drawings for the core pile structure can be finalized this afternoon." Liu Huaqiang signed a process flow sheet, "The vacuum seal test for the Helium-3 cryogenic separation module passed this morning."

Wen Bo walked over from the material testing area, his gloves still on, his fingertips covered in grayish-white powder.

"The neutron shielding rate of the first version of the protective layer is 97.3 percent." Wen Bo rubbed the powder off on his pant leg, "It's one percentage point higher than the target."

"Lunar surface irradiation is much harsher than ground simulation; the larger the margin, the more secure it is."

Su Che glanced at the sample data in Wen Bo's hand, "Add five percent thickness for the second version, and run a round of accelerated aging."

Wen Bo put away the samples and headed back to the material area.

One billion new pairs of glasses were rolling out on global production lines; Jiang Yingxue was in charge of channels, and Qin Lan was handling policy channels; the skill points would be accumulated soon enough.

The underlying architecture of the lithography machine still needed five days to be finished.

The Dry Dock shell installation would be topped out in about two weeks.

In-orbit manufacturing of the lithography machine required the Dry Dock to be completed before there was space to start.

The three timelines were twisted into a single rope; if any one of them dragged, the subsequent chain would be jammed.

Su Che put away his phone and walked back to the main console.

The space footage in the center of the monitoring wall was playing as usual.

A few more dark gray heat-shielding panels had been closed on the Dry Dock's enclosed shell, and five hundred silver-gray robots were shuttling between the frames, the white light of welding torches flashing against the pitch-black background.

He sat down and pulled the screen back to the code repository.

The empty calibration module hung at the end of the architecture diagram like a gaping black hole.

The 6.8-picometer deviation lay quietly in the simulation log.

Before the chip could come to fill this lock, the chessboard had to be fully set up.

Su Che moved the cursor to the first line of the next code block and typed the first character.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

A message from Jiang Yingxue.

"Trade barriers in the four South American countries have been cleared, adding a potential user pool of 300 million; distribution channels will open tomorrow."

Su Che finished reading the message and placed his phone face down on the desk.

With 300 million users pouring in, the growth rate of independent points would jump another level.

The gap in skill points should be filled soon.

But that space factory overhead, which hadn't been topped out yet, couldn't be sped up by a single day.