Nobel Prize winner Samuel Ting paid visited Shandong University on July 6 in Jinan, capital of Shandong province, to discuss cooperation with the university in the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) project in a two-day stay.

The AMS is a large-scale international scientific cooperation project with the objective of searching space for the presence of dark matter, antimatter, new physics and astrophysics phenomena such as strangelets. 

Ting leads the team that gathers particle data from AMS which was installed in international space station in 2011. 

"Scientists expect to come up with a 'decisive outcome' on the search for the source of dark matter by 2024 after analyzing the huge amount of data on cosmic particles," said Professor Ting at a press conference was held on July 7 at the Shandong University.

So far, AMS has gathered more than 120 billion cosmic particles, with energy reaching trillion electron volts, Ting said at the press conference.

Ting also praised Shandong University's contribution to the AMS project.

"Without the contribution of Shandong University's thermal science team, AMS would not have reached its present-day results. Shandong University has played a major role in the design, building, analysis, testing, as well as orbital monitoring of the thermal control system of AMS," said Ting. 

Shandong University joined in the project in 2004 with Cheng Lin, the former director of the university's Institute of Thermal Science and Technology, the serving general manager as the project's fundamental system -- the thermal control system. 

More than 60 PhD students, researchers and academics from the university have worked in the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the Italian Space Agency and the European Space Operations Centre and contributed to AMS's monitoring and data analysis in the past 14 years. 

According to NASA website, the AMS experiment is a state-of-the-art particle physics detector that is being constructed, tested, and operated by an international team composed of 56 institutes from 16 countries and organized under United States Department of Energy (DOE) sponsorship. The AMS experiment will use the unique environment of space to advance the knowledge of the universe and lead to an understanding of the universe’s origin.

A press conference on Professor Samuel Ting’s visit to Shandong University is convened on July 7 at the Shandong University in Jinan, Shandong province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] 

Nobel Prize winner Samuel Ting gives a talk at a press conference on July 7 at the Shandong University in Jinan, Shandong province. [Photo/sdu.edu.cn] 

Nobel laureate Samuel Ting (left) attends an interview show at Shandong University on July 6 in Jinan, Shandong province. [Photo/sdu.edu.cn]