Jian-Wei Pan

Jian-Wei Pan (born March 11, 1970, in Dongyang, Zhejiang, China) is a Chinese physicist known for pioneering long-distance quantum communication and satellite-based quantum experiments. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Science and Technology of China and his PhD from the University of Vienna under the Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger. He returned to USTC as a professor of physics, was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011 at age forty one, one of its youngest members, an academician of the World Academy of Sciences in 2012, and became the university's executive vice president. In 2004 his group achieved the first experimental demonstration of five-photon entanglement. He led the Quantum Experiments at Space Scale project, which launched the world's first quantum satellite in August 2016, and in June 2017 his team demonstrated quantum entanglement distributed over 1,200 kilometers between ground stations using that satellite. In 2021 he led development of two quantum computers, the superconducting Zuchongzhi 2.1, reported as roughly one million times faster than Google's Sycamore processor on a specific benchmark, and the photon-based Jiuzhang. Nature magazine called him the Father of Quantum in a 2017 profile, and Time magazine named him one of its 100 most influential people in 2018.