[Salon] China’s top quantum physicist Pan Jianwei named Royal Society fellow, days after US sanctions target Chinese sector

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

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China’s top quantum physicist Pan Jianwei named Royal Society fellow, days after US sanctions target Chinese sector

17 May 2024

Pan Jianwei has been recognised by the Royal Society of London for his pioneering work in areas including “quantum experiments in space” and achievements in quantum computing technology. Photo: Dickson Lee

China’s “father of quantum” has been elected as a fellow of London’s Royal Society, days after the latest US sanctions list targeted the “core” of Chinese quantum technology.

Pan Jianwei, a leading physicist who built the world’s first quantum satellite, is among “over 90 exceptional researchers from across the world” to be named this year by the society, or Britain’s national academy of sciences.

Announcing the list on Thursday, the Royal Society said “the elected fellows are leaders in their fields” and “recognised for their invaluable contributions to science”.

Pan, a professor of modern physics and executive vice-president at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), has done pioneering work “in multi-article interferometry and quantum experiments in space”, the society’s Fellows Directory says.

It also praises his team for having “closed major loopholes for secure quantum communication associated with imperfect devices, making it a viable technology under realistic conditions”.

Pan also featured on the 2017 “Nature’s 10”, the premier magazine’s annual list of the people who matter most in science. He had “lit a fire” under China’s quantum technology efforts since returning full-time in 2008 after training in Europe, Nature said, labelling Pan as “a physicist who took quantum communication to space and back”.

In 2016, under Pan’s leadership, China launched the world’s first quantum science space satellite, Micius, with a mission to establish a secure communication line between China and Europe, a fact mentioned also in the Royal Society directory.

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The same year, President Xi Jinping handed China’s top science honour – the State Natural Science Award (first class) – to a team of physicists led by Pan.

China’s Micius is the world’s first quantum science satellite. Photo: Chinese Academy of Sciences

Pan’s team and the company he co-founded, QuantumCtek, also participated in building several quantum networks linking Chinese cities several hundred kilometres apart, such as the Beijing-Shanghai quantum link, with huge government support.

The Royal Society bio also lauded Pan for his achievements in quantum computing technology. “His team demonstrated quantum computational advantage, validating the feasibility of quantum computing systems to outperform classical machines in solving specific problems,” his bio says.

The breakthroughs made by Pan’s USTC team are often reported by top academic journals.

In October last year, they unveiled the Jiuzhang 3, a prototype quantum computer that was the first to manipulate 255 photons. It is capable of performing specific computations billions of times faster than the world’s fastest supercomputers, according to their paper published in Physical Review Letters.

And earlier this month, Pan and his team announced the development of an artificial quantum system with groundbreaking implications for physics, and which could pave the way for fault-tolerant quantum computing, they said in a paper published in the journal Science.

Pan is also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China’s premier research institute, and is director of the CAS Centre for Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics in Anhui province, where he is based with the USTC.

The Royal Society honour for Pan comes barely a week after the US Commerce Department’s updated export control list named 22 of China’s leading players in quantum research and industry among the 37 Chinese “entities” targeted.

Physicists in China described the May 9 “Entities List” move as “unprecedented”, as it targeted almost “all of China’s core strength” in quantum information research, including the USTC.

The USTC is not only home to leading quantum physicists such as Pan, but also an innovation hub that has spawned many start-ups, thanks to steady scientific breakthroughs, a competitive talent pool and generous local government support.

The Royal Society, formally the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, was founded in 1660 and is the world’s oldest continuous scientific academy.

In 2022, George Gao Fu, then head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, a leading scientist in the field of virology and immunology, was elected by the society for his contribution to the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.