A few days after the Chinese New Year in late January, Huiqian Luo – a physicist from the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing – flew to Australia. He was travelling to a neutron source in Sydney where he was set to study a novel iron-based superconductor. Luo planned to arrive early so that he could prepare the experiment at the facility before his students joined.

Luo’s travel occurred just as a previously unknown and highly contagious coronavirus was spreading through the Chinese city of Wuhan. Almost 1700 people had already died and hundreds of new cases were being confirmed every day in already overwhelmed local hospitals. Despite a strict lockdown in Wuhan, the infections worsened so quickly that many countries started to issue travel bans against visitors from mainland China.

Luo arrived in Australia on 30 January – two days before it imposed a travel ban meaning Luo had to complete the two-week-long experiment on his own. When his return flight was cancelled, Luo was forced to scramble to get back home, arranging a detour via Guangzhou, a city near Hong Kong. He finally made it back to Beijing on 15 February, just as the COVID-19 outbreak was nearing its peak in China.

Luo’s story typified the many disruptions that COVID-19 has caused to the lives of physicists around the world – and to experimentalists who work at large facilities in particular. Declared a global pandemic in mid-March, many facilities in Asia, Europe and the US shut down entirely, with only a handful remaining open, mostly to focus on coronavirus-related research. Lots of experiments, which often take years to plan, may now never happen.

Many countries are still struggling to battle the pandemic, which has swept the world and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. China – where the virus first broke out – battled too. But as in other countries, researchers quickly adapted and discovered ways to remain productive during the lockdown.

Luo, for example, found time during the lockdown to pause, ponder and draw new inspiration from past research, leaving him relatively optimistic for the future. “I don’t think there will be long-term impacts on the discipline of physics as a whole, because the cycle of physics research is very long,” says Luo. “Scientists around the world are adapting well to the new reality of working remotely.”

Indeed, Luo and his colleagues were able to finish a few manuscripts during the lockdown, including a paper based on the February experiment in Australia. He also gave several online talks watched by more than 500 people – far more than ever saw the in-person talks he had hosted at the institute. And despite a few smaller virus outbreaks since the first wave passed, researchers in China are now starting to get back to the “new normal”.

However, many scientists still face uncertain funding delays as the country recovers, while for other researchers the problems caused by the virus are more tangible. One such scientist is Shaolin Xiong – an astrophysicist at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), Chinese Academy of Sciences – who has been working around the clock with his team since officials lifted the original lockdown order in Beijing in late April . Xiong is principal investigator of a space science mission called the Gravitational-wave high-energy Electromagnetic Counterpart All-sky Monitor (GECAM), which is scheduled for launch by the end of the year.

The GECAM mission was proposed following the first detection of gravitational waves by the US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). It is designed to catch gamma-ray bursts associated with gravitational-wave events – such as the merger of two neutron stars – and help locate the sources with high precision. GECAM consists of two small satellites, each weighing about 150 kg, which will orbit on opposite sides of the Earth to monitor the entire sky for these extremely energetic, short-lived bursts.

Most teams in China may face tighter budgets for the rest of 2020 and possibly beyond, but the entire physics community believes the difficulties are temporary

Yifang Wang

Xiong says that the temporary closure of electronics factories during the worst phase of the outbreak in China set the team back by a month. “We’ve been working very hard to deliver our commitment to the scientific community by sending GECAM into orbit by the end of 2020,” says Xiong, adding that they plan to deliver the assembled detectors to the satellite platform by mid-July. Once the satellites are in orbit, they will work together with ground-based detectors in the US, Europe and Japan to study gamma-ray bursts associated with gravitational waves. Physicists say that GECAM might spot several associated events each year. “GECAM will represent one of the first new ‘all sky’ devices that will be able to look for associated signals, wherever a gravitational wave event occurs in the sky,” says Nobel laureate Barry Barish, who is a former LIGO director.

Challenges in sight

Compared to GECAM, some projects are facing financial and logistical uncertainties as they navigate longer timelines. Funding delays have already impacted some major physics research infrastructure under construction in China. In May, the National Development and Reform Commission notified IHEP director Yifang Wang that about half of this year’s grant for the planned High Energy Photon Source will not be given out until next year or later. That will leave a hole of 300 million yuan ($42m) in the contract for construction of the facility that is being built on the outskirts of Beijing.

With a total investment of 4.8 billion yuan (nearly $700m), the High Energy Photon Source is one of the most expensive research facilities China has approved and the delay will increase the project’s cost. When it opens in 2025, it will be one of the world’s most powerful multi-purpose machines to probe the inner structures of materials. “It’s totally understandable if the government feels financially strained under such circumstances,” says Wang.

Wang suggests that one possible solution is to borrow “idle money” from other projects and return it later. However, the team must first secure a set of government permissions. “If we can get a green light on this, the photon source project will probably pull through,” says Wang. He adds that most teams in China may face tighter budgets for the rest of 2020 and possibly beyond, but that the “entire physics community believes the difficulties are temporary and will be overcome”.

With scientific evidence, we answered the question of how the world will see us – and how we should see ourselves – when the pandemic is over

Tao Wang

Other concerns face Chinese projects that involve international contributions. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) that is being built in southern China will aim to measure the mass hierarchies of neutrinos when it comes online by the end of 2021. Researchers expect to receive a liquid scintillator purification system from Italian partners this September, but that could now be delayed. “If the international travel bans remain in place by that time, our team will not be able to go to China and install those plants,” says Gioacchino Ranucci from the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Milan, Italy, who is the European co-ordinator of the JUNO consortium. Ranucci notes that its supplier, an Italian company called Polaris, has worked hard to keep up with the schedule even during the lockdown. Indeed, Ranucci and his coworkers are now looking for ways to travel to the JUNO site. “We are considering applying for a special permit [from the government],” he says.

But many international projects involving China will almost certainly experience delays. The Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) – a telescope jointly developed by France and China to detect gamma-ray bursts from the most distant explosions of stars – is now running late by at least five months. In January scientists from the two countries completed the integration and environmental testing of the prototype satellite in Shanghai. They were supposed to meet in Chengdu after that and finish the review for the test. Instead, the team finished the review online during the lockdown.

The launch date has slipped from late 2021 to the first half of 2022, says Bertrand Cordier of the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre in France, who co-ordinated French involvement in SVOM. Now the challenge is building the satellite and the team has encountered delays from suppliers and from their inability to go back to the lab to assemble those parts. “For the first part of the flight model test, I’m afraid our Chinese colleagues may need to do it on their own with remote support from us here in France,” says Cordier.

The new “normal”

On 8 April materials scientist Tao Wang was back on the campus of the Wuhan University of Technology for the first time since the coronavirus hit his city. After 76 days of lockdown, citizens of Wuhan were allowed to leave their homes and Wang made a quick trip to the office. His building was quiet and empty, and his desk and laboratory equipment were covered in dust. Only two pot plants had managed to survive. Wang and his colleagues were not ready to restart experiments, so they used April and May to catch up with university paperwork due at this time every year. They also finished online interviews with nearly 1000 incoming graduate students.

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Wang was relieved that Wuhan, the first and one of the hardest-hit epicentres of the pandemic, seemed to be bouncing back quickly. Citywide testing in the second half of May revealed 300 infections – all asymptomatic – among its 10 million residents. “With scientific evidence, we answered the question of how the world will see us – and how we should see ourselves – when the pandemic is over,” says Wang.

On 8 June five of Wang’s graduate students were back in his lab. “It’s been five months….we are all thrilled,” says Hui Wang, a PhD student from Wuhan. “The campus is clean and calm as ever, as if we had never been away.” Hui Wang plans to work at the lab throughout the summer and is eager to carry out experiments on perovskite solar cells to test numerical simulations she did during the lockdown. She also says that the lockdown gave her time to think about new research ideas.

Back in Beijing, Huiqian Luo is still waiting for an official permit for his students to return to the lab – a step that might face further delay because of the June cluster of cases that were linked with a wholesale food market in the south of the city. For now, his group can remotely conduct experiments at neutron sources in Japan, France and the UK. “It’s a good way to engage with students when travel is not free,” says Luo. “But I really look forward to seeing them soon.”