"What?"
"A single crystal?!"
"The technology used to manufacture single-crystal blades for aircraft engines?"
After Lin Weiguo offered a few pointers, realization dawned on everyone's faces.
A single crystal was an extremely special metallic material, possessing unparalleled hardness and a perfect internal arrangement of atoms.
Originally, this material had existed only in nature, as naturally occurring perfect crystals.
Only after later breakthroughs in human manufacturing techniques had single-crystal blades based on nickel-iron alloys been used in aircraft engines.
China's aircraft engines had always been less than ideal, with service lives far shorter than Eagle Country's, precisely because it lagged behind in manufacturing materials such as single crystals.
Materials science was the foundation of all applied sciences. Inadequate materials would restrict the development of applied technology.
Yet Chen Jue had used fighter-engine blade technology on the casing of a lithography machine. Such extravagance, comparable to flaunting wealth, had left everyone present dumbstruck.
"I just wanted to give it a more protective casing, so I made a single-crystal material bonded in five layers."
"Essentially, it combines five elements-copper, iron, nickel, aluminum, and lead-into one. Even if there were a nuclear explosion outside, neither the electromagnetic pulse nor the nuclear radiation could penetrate this machine and affect the chip fabrication inside," Chen Jue explained calmly.
Hearing this, both Zou Ying's and Lin Weiguo's faces involuntarily twitched.
Good grief!
Humanity had, at most, only mastered a two-layer process for nickel-iron single crystals, and he had jumped straight to five layers.
And he had fucking done it casually, on a whim!
To technical people like them, this was nothing but a display of humblebragging!
"A five-layer single-crystal structure?"
"Couldn't we strip off that casing and use it to make rockets or nuclear submarine hulls, with more than enough to spare?"
"This is really... absolutely incredible!"