The 2026 World Young Scientist Summit opened on Oct 24 in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province. During the summit, the first Global Young Scientist Pioneer List (Quantum Science and Technology) 2035 was released, with 20 scientists under the age of 35 selected. Their research covers multiple directions including quantum computing, quantum materials, quantum artificial intelligence, precision measurement and quantum networks.
The list brings together researchers from 11 universities, 5 companies and 2 research institutions. By current primary affiliation, 7 are from Chinese institutions, 10 from US institutions and 3 from European institutions. Five of the selected researchers are women, accounting for 25 percent.
In the field of quantum materials, Cao Yuan from the University of California, Berkeley drew attention for discovering superconductivity in magic-angle graphene. In 2018, Cao and his collaborators published two papers in Nature reporting insulating and superconducting states in twisted bilayer graphene, providing a new experimental platform for studying unconventional superconductivity and novel quantum states of matter.
Cai Jiaqi of the Hefei National Laboratory participated in the discovery of a new fractional quantum Hall state that requires no external magnetic field. Such states involve the collective behavior of electrons and could provide new experimental conditions for studying fractional charge excitations and topological quantum computing. Kong Lingyuan of Westlake University is searching for evidence of Majorana zero modes in iron-based superconductors. The related research is expected to offer material clues for exploring topological quantum computing that is more resistant to external interference.
Quantum computing is another key direction. Zhong Hansen, founder and CEO of Shanghai Qisuan Guangqi, is the first author of the "Jiuzhang" photonic quantum computing research. In 2020, the related team used photons to complete a sampling task that classical computers struggle to simulate efficiently, demonstrating quantum computational advantage on a specific task.
Dolev Bluvstein of the quantum computing company Oratomic participated in research focused on error correction in quantum computing. Qubits are prone to errors due to environmental interference, limiting the scale and reliability of quantum computing. The related team realized a quantum circuit involving 48 logical qubits in a neutral-atom system, exploring ways to use quantum error correction to protect information and advance scalable quantum computing.
The relationship between quantum and classical computing is also changing. Ewin Tang of Princeton University proposed a quantum-inspired classical algorithm at the age of 18, proving that for certain recommendation tasks, classical algorithms can achieve computational efficiency previously thought to require quantum algorithms. This work shows that the advantages of quantum computing need to be evaluated for specific tasks and computational conditions.
In the field of quantum artificial intelligence, Huang Xinyuan, chief technology officer of Oratomic, studies how to learn about complex quantum systems from limited experimental measurements and explores the advantages of quantum machine learning and the conditions under which they apply. The related methods could help researchers reduce experimental requirements and analyze complex systems such as quantum materials more effectively.
Selected researchers in the precision measurement direction include Zhang Chuankun of Caltech and Tobias Bothwell of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Zhang Chuankun participated in research using a vacuum ultraviolet frequency comb to measure the transition frequency of the thorium-229 nucleus and linked the measurement results to a strontium atomic clock. These efforts provide an experimental basis for developing a nuclear optical clock. A nuclear optical clock uses nuclear energy-level transitions for timekeeping and is expected to offer new tools for precision measurement and fundamental physics research.
Tobias Bothwell and collaborators used ultracold strontium atoms and precision atomic clocks to measure gravitational redshift within a millimeter-scale atomic sample. The research was published in Nature in 2022, demonstrating the ability of precision atomic clocks to test general relativity.
The list also covers directions including quantum networks, quantum simulation and quantum information security. Sophie Hermans of QuTech at Delft University of Technology studies the transmission of quantum information through intermediate nodes, providing a technical path for building scalable quantum networks; Chen Yilei of Tsinghua University studies the security of cryptographic protocols in the quantum computing era; and William J Huggins of Google Quantum AI explores methods for quantum computers and classical computers to collaborate in simulating molecular electronic structures.
