In recent years, undergraduates in Kashi University have won a few awards in the northwestern and Xinjiang regional competition of the China Undergraduate Physics Tournament (CUPT), respectively. After a brief description of the CUPT, this paper summarizes in details the activities, achievements, and the gains about practices and organizations (during the COVID-19 pandemic) of the CUPT at Kashi University. Moreover, how these aspects affect on Kashi University in encouraging and enhancing freshmen's self-confidences, enlightening scientific research training for undergraduates, cultivating undergraduates' creative practical abilities, enhancing students' abilities of debate, communication and teamwork, promoting the quality of teaching and education of the college, and realizing the goal of building a first-class university in Xinjiang are further analyzed and discussed, which takes aims at promoting the level of practical teaching of physics in the second classroom onto a new step and cultivation of the creative and high-quality undergraduates at the application-oriented Kashi University.

Due to challenges in preparing pure metal clusters and in controlling reactions, the oxides produced by metal clusters reacting with oxygen are often different from traditional ion-molecule products in the gas phase and their reactivity pattern is also largely unveiled yet. In this work, utilizing a customized Re-TOFMS having a home-made cluster source and a flow tube reactor, we have observed the gaseous reactions of Ni_n^± clusters with oxygen and found magic clusters of Ni₁₃O₈^± that dominate the mass distributions. By quantum chemistry calculations, we find that both Ni₁₃O₈^– and Ni₁₃O₈⁺ clusters bear a regular cubic structure with 8 oxygen anchoring the eight angles, however, they have rather different spin accommodations. The Ni₁₃O₈^– clusters have 15 unpaired spin-up electrons exhibiting cubic aromaticity and decent ferromagnetism, while the Ni₁₃O₈⁺ clusters take a lower-spin ground state (11 unpaired electrons), with spin-down population on the central Ni atom pertaining to ferrimagnetism. This is a class of metalloxocube clusters that hold properties of aromaticity and ferromagnetism/ferrimagnetism charcterized by a few spin electrons, which embodies the bonding nature of superatomic compounds and enables to develop cluster-genetic materials of multi-functionality.