Zhong Lin Wang (Chinese: 王中林; pinyin: Wáng Zhōnglín; born November 1961[1]) is a Chinese-American physicist, materials scientist and engineer specialized in nanotechnology, energy science and electronics.

[2] In 2024, it was reported that Wang had moved to work in China full-time at the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems.

It was widely speculated that this was due to US government persecution of Chinese-American scientists through the China Initiative as well as the rise of anti-Asian attacks in the United States.

[4] Wang invented piezoelectric nanogenerators in 2006,[5] for generating electricity from tiny mechanical energy offered by ZnO nanowire arrays.

Wang suggested adding an additional term 𝜕𝑃𝑠/𝜕𝑡 into the Maxwell's displacement current for the cases when the surface polarization is present.

[14] Recently, Wang studied the entropy theory of energy distribution and utilization for the era of internet of things.

When applying a stress on a material with a non-centrosymmetric crystal structure, a piezoelectric potential (piezopotential) can be produced.

Such phenomenon is called as the piezo-phototronic effect, discovered by Wang in 2009,[26] in which the optoelectronic processes are tuned and controlled by the created piezopotential.

[29] The photo emission can occur, resulting from the drop of trapped charges from the vacancy/surface states back to the valence band, under the existence of the piezoelectric potential.

[32] In 1999 Wang and co-workers used transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to measure the properties of individual carbon nanotubes, including the mechanical, electrical and field emission ones.

He published a textbook on Elastic and Inelastic Scattering in Electron Diffraction and Imaging (Plenum Press, 1995)[27].

In scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), the high-angle annular dark-field (HAADF) (referred as Z-contrast) is dominated by the thermal diffuse scattering (TDS) and a dynamic theory for including TDS in image simulation of HAADF was proposed.