Chapter 76: Encountering a Problem

Xu Qingzhou returned to the dorm with his backpack; on every desk sat a pile of club flyers.

“What a buzz,” Xu Qingzhou muttered.

Xu Zhengyang was still scrolling through the club flyers; seeing Xu Qingzhou return, he asked, “Lao Xu, you’re really not joining any clubs?”

Xu Qingzhou set down his backpack and shook his head. “No. Even if I joined, I wouldn’t have time to go.”

“I signed up for the street dance club and the guitar club,” Xu Zhengyang grinned, nudging Xu Qingzhou. “Lao Xu, why not join street dance? Those girls—wow, each one’s hotter than the last.”

“Didn’t you say you’re tone-deaf?” Xu Qingzhou was more interested in the guitar club—this guy howled like a banshee in the shower, never hitting a single note.

Xu Zhengyang rolled his eyes. “Just because I’m tone-deaf doesn’t mean I can’t have a heart that chases dreams?”

“This guy was tricked into the guitar club by their gorgeous president,” Kong Xian bluntly revealed, sighing. “And Lao Zhai signed up too.”

If I can’t outstudy them, I won’t lose at staying up all night!

Study! {

“Dong Shan’s in the street dance club too,” Xu Zhengyang shrugged.

The boy took a deep breath, straightened up, and suddenly felt a surge of competitive fire.

Back in the dorm, they chatted a while longer. Aside from Xu Qingzhou, who planned to join nothing, Kong Xian intended to join the student union, and Zhai Ziqiang had signed up for both the guitar club and the literature society.

Hearing those two words, Zhai Ziqiang—who had just closed his eyes—immediately lost his sleepiness, opened his phone, and scrolled through the lecture notes he’d photographed that day.

Niobium-titanium alloy is a material with zero-resistance properties, yet no matter how precisely or perfectly it’s processed, physically, energy loss still occurs during current transmission.

Xu Qingzhou didn’t tease Zhai Ziqiang about wanting to learn an instrument; Zhai’s family had already struggled to send one kid to Jingda—learning an instrument wasn’t realistic. He smiled at Xu Zhengyang: “Lao Xu, you’re ogling girls—won’t Dong Shan get jealous?”

“Not yet certain,” Xu Qingzhou sat down at the workstation and said, “Brother Wang, I’d like to see the internal microstructure diagrams of all the samples first.”

At this moment, Xu Qingzhou didn’t notice the boy’s strange gaze—he was already meticulously screening the data: first checking the model, then the data, time, magnetic field strength. When inputting the data after sample #22, minor anomalies still appeared.

“Alright,” Wang Wei, though anxious, gave a slight nod. He’d waited three days already—this little extra time didn’t matter.

“Studying,” Kong Xian replied flatly.

He’d encountered this person in the self-study room for two straight days—seemingly wrestling with an extremely difficult calculation.

If the data shows nothing wrong, then it must be... the material?

The boy couldn’t help but marvel—where had this genius appeared from?

The computer’s data files were complete.

b_c(t)=b_0\cdot(1-t^2/t_c^2)bc(t)=b0(1t2/tc2).

Another hour passed. Xu Qingzhou exhaled deeply, leaning back in his chair—he seemed stuck in a bottleneck.

For three full days, Xu Qingzhou had been immersed in complex data, as if regaining the state he’d been in when leading his experiments, maintaining a routine of library, dorm, cafeteria. He rubbed his temples, checked the time—it was already 3 a.m. The senior who’d been studying with him had left sometime ago; he shut off the computer, gathered his things, and headed back to the dorm to sleep.

When n is 0, working backward, current flows from positive to negative with zero loss.

n is the rate at which current density declines with increasing magnetic field strength—this means the problem occurred during the 10th test of sample #22. In the self-study room, besides Xu Qingzhou, another boy was still working hard, staring at the mountain of data and thick stacks of scratch paper covered in dense calculations.

Xu Qingzhou was surprised—hadn’t expected Dong Shan to be interested in street dance. He also felt uneasy for Xu Zhengyang; at least now, Dong Shan clearly had a passionate heart, while Xu Zhengyang, though he looked flashy, was just a loudmouth and a greenhorn—could he even handle her?

On Thursday morning, after the advanced algebra class ended, Xu Qingzhou headed straight for the lab.

The relationship between critical magnetic field strength $b_c$ and temperature $t$ is:

Watching Xu Qingzhou walk out, Kong Xian, who had been lying on his bed, frowned slightly, got up silently, and pulled out his Math 1 textbook.

In three days, Brother Wang looked much more worn out.

Zhai Ziqiang said apologetically, “I just want to learn an instrument myself.”

Yes, if the current experiments continue, by sample #80, all data seem to be improving steadily—but beyond that, by sample #100, the value of n will drop to 0.

“Young brother, any progress?” Wang Wei asked the moment they met.

Yet even so, by the end of the second night, he’d only completed the second model—adding temperature as a variable while accounting for magnetic field strength’s effect on critical current density, optimizing the model to include temperature’s influence on critical magnetic field strength.

!.

Wang Wei was truly worried—not just him, but Zhao Sheng and Hong Yuyu were too. Time was running out. According to rumors, Jinling University had already built their model and begun testing.

At midnight, Xu Qingzhou took a shower, grabbed his laptop, and went to the self-study room on the third floor of the dorm.

bc=b0*(1-(t/tc)**2)#calculate critical magnetic field strengthifbcraisevalueerror(「temperatureistoohighforsuperconductivity.「)jc=j0*(1-b/bc)**nreturnjc After inputting the values, Xu Qingzhou suddenly noticed several sets of data were anomalous.

(b，t，j0=1e10，b0=12，tc=4，n=1) The output value should be n=2.

“Lao Kong, what’re you doing with a book at this hour?” Xu Zhengyang lay on his bed, grinning stupidly at his phone.

Xu Qingzhou turned on his computer, opened Python, and plugged the temperature-dependent critical magnetic field strength into the critical current density model.

Sample types included Nb-44Ti, Nb-46.5Ti, Nb-48Ti, Nb-50Ti, Nb-53Ti, Nb-55Ti; besides structure diagrams, there were corresponding sample preparation composition tables.

In addition to niobium (Nb) and titanium (Ti), trace amounts of hafnium (Hf) and zirconium (Zr) were added.

Xu Qingzhou continuously examined the niobium-titanium alloy microstructure diagrams while pulling up the sample preparation composition tables to verify his hypothesis.

Near 11 p.m., Xu Qingzhou looked across at Wang Wei, who was organizing data, and said, “I found the problem.”

(End of chapter)