Jian-Wei Pan: building the quantum internet

For many decades since its inception in the early twentieth century, quantum mechanics seemed to be an exotic and peculiarly non-intuitive kind of physics that applied to matter at the smallest scales: the laws that govern atoms, photons and subatomic particles. All our engineering, meanwhile, was dominated by the familiar rules of classical physics, in which objects have definite positions, trajectories and properties. But, in the past several decades, scientists have started to harness quantum rules in practical technologies. In 1985, the physicist Richard Feynman suggested that computers governed by quantum rules might be capable of computations beyond the means of classical ones like those in use today. At much the same time, other researchers showed that information encoded in quantum states could be transmitted between a sender and receiver using a kind of encryption that could not be intercepted and read without that being detected. Quantum computers and quantum cryptography have now become central components of a real-world quantum-information technology that may soon find scientific, industrial and social uses. These applications could be increasingly enabled by a global information network with quantum capability: a quantum internet. China is at the forefront of that enterprise, and one of the scientific leaders in this effort is Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. Pan studied for his PhD with quantum-information pioneer Anton Zeilinger in Vienna before returning to China to implement these nascent technologies. In 2012, he won the International Quantum Communication Award and, in 2017, he was included in Nature’s annual list of the ‘ten people who mattered in science’ over the past year. That July, he and his colleagues reported ‘quantum teleportation’ of photons from a ground-based station to a satellite 1400 km away. NSR recently interviewed Professor Pan about the current achievements and future prospects for quantum-information technologies.