In August, the clouds in Dalian were light, the sea was blue, and the sea breeze with the smell of sea oysters came. Li Can and his wife and daughter finished their foreign study visit and returned to their home, which had been "sealed" for 3 years, with some simple packing. That afternoon, Li Can went to work at Dalian Institute of Chemical Technology with two large boxes of parts to start the development of ultraviolet Raman spectroscopy.

The year was 1996, the international UV Raman spectroscopy application and catalytic related research had just started, Li Chan was eager to carry out related research in China as soon as possible, and take a place in the international catalytic community as early as possible.

Starting from the UV Raman spectroscopy instrument, China's catalytic science gradually began to appear on the world stage. In the past 40 years, Li Can, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a researcher at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (hereinafter referred to as DIC), has been involved in many directions of catalytic research, from catalysts to spectral characterization of catalytic reactions, and has made important contributions to the development of catalytic science in China and the world.

Recently, ACS Catalysis, a high-level international journal in the field of catalysis, published an Account article on Li Can, which systematically reviewed his academic career and major academic achievements in the past 40 years.

"Pressing" the new to reveal the international

After returning to China, Li Chan seldom took weekends and holidays, and "seemed to have an inexhaustible energy and work".

Raman spectroscopy is one of the most powerful tools for characterizing catalysts and catalytic reactions, but it has not been widely used in catalytic research for many years, mainly because of fluorescence interference and low sensitivity.

For three years before returning to China, Can Li worked at the Center for Catalysis and Surface Research at Northwestern University, where he collaborated with Peter Stair, a leading international expert in surface catalysis and a professor at the Center, to experimentally demonstrate that UV Raman spectroscopy can bypass fluorescence interference, which is the first time that a UV Raman spectrometer has been used to successfully obtain Raman spectra of practical catalysts. This result has attracted much attention in the American catalysis community.

After returning to China, the first problem that Li Can needed to solve was the UV Raman spectroscopy technique. The development process went through many twists and turns, and it was difficult to obtain a stable laser source because the continuous-wave UV laser had just been introduced internationally at that time. In addition, Li Can brought back the spectroscopy system in the UV region is not coated, the grating also can not work in the UV region, more serious is, the processing of internal reflection ellipsoidal collection mirror and other key components encountered difficulties.

Li Can led his team to be self-reliant and contacted factories that could process the parts to solve one technical problem after another.

After 2 years of hard work, finally at the end of 1998, the first domestic UV Raman spectrometer for catalytic and material research was successfully developed. Excited, Li Can immediately devoted himself to catalytic research on new characterization techniques: catalyst surface carbon accumulation, molecular sieve synthesis, structural characterization of heteroatomic molecular sieves, and so on.

Using UV Raman spectroscopy, the team successfully identified the structure of the skeletal transition metal heteroatoms in heteroatomic molecular sieves for the first time in the international arena. The structure of the active center of heteroatomic molecular sieve catalysts was a key scientific issue in green oxidation catalysis at that time. To date, the international research on transition metal heteroatom molecular sieves mostly uses UV resonance Raman technique to characterize their active centers.

UV Raman spectroscopy has become a landmark research progress in the international catalytic community. At the same time, based on industrial needs and cutting-edge difficulties, Li Can also laid out multi-phase chiral catalytic synthesis and fuel oil ultra-deep desulfurization research, which not only achieved the best international results in basic research, but also advanced the process of catalytic industrialization.

Since then, Li has been invited to write reviews and give presentations at international conferences, and in 2004, Li became the first scientist from a developing country to receive the International Catalysis Award, and in 2008, he was elected as the President of the International Catalysis Council.

After several generations of scientists' efforts, under the leadership of Li Can and other Chinese catalytic scientists, the 16th International Catalysis Conference, known as the "International Olympic Games in Catalysis", was held in Beijing in 2016, and China's catalytic science research formally entered the international arena.

In order to promote China's development into a catalytic power, Li also actively promotes cooperation between China and other countries in catalysis and science and technology, establishing the Sino-French Joint Catalysis Laboratory, launching the Sino-Dutch Strategic Cooperation Alliance, the China-Japan-Korea Foresight Program and other international catalytic cooperation projects.

Rising to the challenge without fear of failure

At the turn of the century, Li Can was one of the most active periods in scientific research.

At that time, a "question of fate" was buried in Li's mind: where should the future of centuries-old catalytic science go?

Many developing countries such as China have been relying on fossil resources such as coal, oil and natural gas, and past catalytic research has mainly addressed the conversion of fossil resources into energy and materials. The call to return to human ecological civilization is getting louder and louder.

What can be done as a science and technology worker?

"Global climate change vaguely evokes my conscience and responsibility as a science and technology worker: not just to be satisfied with my scientific interests, but also to pay attention to the current environmental problems and the future ecological problems of human existence." Li Can said that the development of the use of solar energy and various renewable energy sources with solar energy as the source is the fundamental way out for mankind to repair the ecological balance of the earth.

Li Can visited Japan with his thoughts, starting from Hokkaido and going all the way south to Kyushu, where he visited and exchanged with all the universities and research institutes mainly engaged in solar energy research.

In 2001, Li Can made a major and "bold" decision in his scientific career: to shift the focus of traditional catalysis and start research on solar photocatalytic decomposition of water for hydrogen production. The reason is that it is ideal to use solar energy to catalyze the decomposition of water to produce hydrogen and to hydrogenate carbon dioxide to make solar fuels such as methanol.

The reason for this "boldness" is that this is a worldwide problem. Because of its enormous challenges and slow progress, by 2000, almost no one in China had persisted in photolytic hydrogen research.

"The world problem itself is meaningful, and it is worth failing." Like a warrior, Li Can steadfastly climbed to the peak of science.

However, the road is long, but at the beginning, he was fortunate to receive help from eight directions. Li Can in many years of close friends, Japan's Tokyo Institute of Technology, Professor Kazunari Don't free the help of the assembly of the first set of photocatalytic decomposition of water experimental device, Sinopec risk funding the first research funds ......

With the initial conditions, to find the bottleneck scientific problems, Li Can led the team, head to head to attack the "three battles": efficient light trapping materials, photogenerated charge separation mechanism and efficient co-catalyst, to lay the theoretical foundation for solar fuel synthesis. At the same time, he has proposed the "hydrogen farm" HFP 1.0, HFP 2.0 and HFP 3.0 strategies for solar photocatalytic hydrogen production.

Learning from natural photosynthesis, Li Can has proposed a two-step approach to solar fuel synthesis, i.e. using solar energy and other renewable energy sources to decompose water to make hydrogen, and then solving the two-step approach to synthesize solar fuel by hydrogenating carbon dioxide to make methanol and other fuels. At the same time, Li's team has completed the world's first kiloton scale solar fuel synthesis demonstration, which is a key step towards the industrial production of solar energy and other renewable energy sources into liquid fuels.

Given that Li Can's team has achieved several landmark results in the direction of solar artificial photosynthesis research, it has attracted the attention of the international academic community and has twice participated in and hosted the preparation of international white papers on solar energy research, which have been released worldwide to promote international solar artificial photosynthesis research.

In 2020, Li Chan's team received support from the National Science Foundation of China for the "Center for Basic Synthesis of Artificial Light" project after expert evaluation.

Nowadays, the goal of carbon neutrality is imminent, and solar fuels such as green hydrogen and green methanol are considered by domestic and foreign experts as the ideal way to solve the problem of carbon dioxide reduction and even reach the goal of "double carbon".

The team members were surprised to find that this was a natural "coincidence"! "If we bite down on the green hills and never relax, we can always make our own contribution to the country and mankind as long as we persevere." Li Can said so.

"All scientific research is easy to chase hot spots, rarely start from the very cold!" Li Can exclaims. He often used these experiences to encourage young people, science and technology workers should have a sense of social responsibility, concern for the needs of the people, the project should be forward-looking, more importantly, catalytic research should be extracted from the background of major applications of scientific topics, remember not just from the books and literature to find the subject, and should not simply follow the trend of chasing hot.

Thanks to his teachers, his ambition is not yet fulfilled

Li Can's path to catalytic science was established when he was a graduate student at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Engineering. Under the guidance of his mentor, Yongan Lu, he was interested in catalytic reactions, and this interest in scientific research was the inner motivation for me to keep exploring science later. Li Can said.

In the words of Fan Fengtao, a student of Li Can's and a researcher at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Engineering, "Li is particularly good at learning and always learning new things."

At the Dalian Institute of Chemical Technology, he studied the rigorous study and research of his doctoral supervisor, Guo Xiexian. As a doctoral student in Japan, he learned from the diligence of his teachers and classmates, who did not seek fame or hotspots, but identified their goals and persevered. In order to get more experimental opportunities, Li Chan worked from 8:00 am to 12:00 pm, "desperately" hard ......

In 1993, although he had been promoted to researcher, Li Can felt that he was "not good enough". Research Center at Northwestern University.

At Northwestern University, Li studied with many masters in the field of catalysis and was eager to learn more. In the past three years, Li took seven large books of notes on academic presentations, and he still looks through them often, still feeling fresh.

"No matter what kind of height you have reached, always be grateful, remember the guidance of your teachers and supervisors, and lift up the people who are silently working for you." Li Can said.

Back to Dalian Institute of Chemical Technology, Li Can devoted his heart and soul to use all his learning in the research layout, discipline development and talent training of the institute. Li Can has trained more than 160 students and 60 postdocs, and most of his "disciples" have become the mainstay of the catalytic community and a new force in the academic and industrial development of catalysis in China.

In 2003, Li Chan was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and he did not stop there, but took it as a starting point to start a new journey. 20 years, he has been working together with young researchers on the front line of scientific research.

Today, Li Can, who has entered his golden years, still feels that "his ambition has passed away", he goes to the laboratory every day, reads the literature, thinks about the direction, discusses with graduate students, and shares his joy or frustration. "This is my greatest joy as a scientist." Li Chan loves this simple life.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)