On the morning of January 28, the 2025 Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Outstanding Scientific and Technological Achievement Prize ceremony was held in Beijing. The "Ductile Inorganic Semiconductors" achievement from the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, CAS, was honored with the 2025 CAS Outstanding Scientific and Technological Achievement Prize in the Basic Research category.

The primary contributors to this achievement are Shi Xun, Chen Lidong, Qiu Pengfei, Yang Shiqi, and Gao Zhiqiang. Addressing the critical scientific challenge where the intrinsic brittleness of inorganic semiconductors prevents macroscopic room-temperature plasticity, the research team was the first in the world to discover that Ag₂S and InSe single crystal possess metal-like mechanical properties at room temperature, with compression, bending, and tensile strains far exceeding those of conventional semiconductors. They revealed the microscopic mechanism of plasticity dominated by "multi-center, diffuse" chemical bonds, proposed a plasticity indicator and a temperature-dependent plasticity model, and identified over 20 types of room-temperature plastic inorganic semiconductors, such as MoS₂, through high-throughput computation.

The team led research into the synergistic regulation of plasticity alongside thermoelectric, ferromagnetic, and sensing functions, creating a series of disruptive plastic inorganic functional materials with excellent performance. They also developed various transformative devices, including ultra-thin flexible thermoelectric devices and flexible temperature-sensing arrays, with some achievements already undergoing technology transfer and commercialization. This research has achieved a "0 to 1" breakthrough in the room-temperature plasticity of inorganic semiconductors, breaking the traditional boundaries between metallic and inorganic non-metallic materials, while opening and leading a new research direction for plastic inorganic semiconductors.

Ductile semiconductor Ag₂S and InSe single crystal