Pan Jianwei


Pan Jianwei is a Chinese quantum physicist known for his work in the field of quantum entanglement. He has been called the "father of quantum" and was named as one of Nature's 10 in 2017. He is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and The World Academy of Sciences, and serves as Vice President of the University of Science and Technology of China.

Early life and education

Pan was born in Dongyang, Zhejiang, China, in 1970. In 1987, he entered the University of Science and Technology of China, from which he received his bachelor's and master's degrees. He received his PhD from the University of Vienna in Austria, where he worked in the group of Anton Zeilinger.

Contributions

Pan's team demonstrated five-photon entanglement in 2004. Under his leadership, the world's first quantum satellite launched successfully in August 2016 as part of the Quantum Experiments at Space Scale, an international research project. In June 2017, Pan's team used their quantum satellite to demonstrate entanglement with satellite-to-ground total summed lengths between 1600km and 2400km and entanglement distribution over 1200 km between receiver stations.

Awards and recognition

He was elected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011 and The World Academy of Sciences in 2012. He also won the International Quantum Communication Award in 2012. In April 2014, he was appointed Vice President of the University of Science and Technology of China. His team's work on double quantum-teleportation was selected as the Physics World Top Breakthrough of the Year in 2015. His team, including Peng Chengzhi, Chen Yu'ao, Lu Chaoyang, and Chen Zengbing, won the State Natural Science Award in 2015. In 2017, the journal Nature named Pan Jianwei among the top 10 people who mattered in the year, with the label "father of quantum".
In 2019, Pan was appointed as lead editor of Physical Review Research.
In 2020, Pan wins Zeiss Research Award, Previous winners of the biennial Zeiss award which recognizes advances in optics and photonics specifically have included the likes of Stefan Hell, Shuji Nakamura, Eric Cornell, and Ahmed Zewail. All were subsequently awarded Nobel prizes.