Jian-Wei Pan

A physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China, who trained in Vienna under Anton Zeilinger.

His group demonstrated multi-photon entanglement and, in 2017, using the Micius satellite, entanglement distribution over more than 1,200 kilometres, and teleportation from the ground up to the satellite. In 2020 the Jiuzhang photonic machine did a task called Gaussian boson sampling with 76 detected photons, which the team estimated to be far beyond classical simulation at the time; classical algorithms have since reduced the gap.

These experiments show that photonic and satellite-based quantum technologies can work outside the laboratory, and they make quantum communication a worldwide effort rather than a regional one.