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US-returned Chinese physicist Duan Luming and team build world’s most powerful ion-based quantum computing machine

  • Team led by Duan at Tsinghua University has been able to achieve the stable trapping and cooling of a two-dimensional crystal of up to 512 ions
  • This is ‘the largest quantum simulation or computation performed to date in a trapped-ion system’, comments one reviewer on study published in Nature

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Duan Luming (right) with some members of his quantum computing research team at Tsinghua University. Photo: Handout
Dannie Peng
Chinese scientists are one step closer to a future large-scale quantum computer – after building the world’s largest quantum simulation machine based on the “trapped-ion” technique, praised by one academic journal reviewer as “a milestone to be recognised”.

The breakthrough was achieved under the leadership of Duan Luming, a quantum physicist renowned for his pioneering research, who returned to China in 2018 after 15 years of teaching in the United States.

Duan received his doctorate in 1998 from the University of Science and Technology of China, the country’s premier institute for quantum research, before joining the University of Michigan in the early 2000s.

Since his return, he has been a full-time professor at Tsinghua University’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences.

Duan and his colleagues, along with several research groups at universities and hi-tech companies around the world, have been chasing the trapped-ion approach to qubits.

Quantum bits, or qubits, are the building blocks of quantum computers, just as “bits” are in regular computers.

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