Established in 1958 as an affiliated university of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei has grown to become one of China’s leading universities in academic research. With talents spanning the entire breadth of the physical sciences, the USTC is set to gain orldclass recognition through the pursuit of original and innovative research.

In October 2011, USTC researchers broke an important record in the world of quantum physics. They successfully sent entangled photons between two points across the Qinghai Lake by using a laser system that could enable quantum teleportation over a distance of 100 km. The achievement was impressive because it demonstrated the feasibility of using satellites to provide secure communications around the world. The results of this study, published in Nature in August 2012, have garnered wide attention from the scientific community and the general public.

The story of quantum teleportation is a mirror of the USTC’s strengths and uniqueness in many ways. When the founding president Moruo Guo laid the first stone on 15 September, 1958, he had a vision of a university that is dedicated to basic research and original innovation.He set himself the mission to cultivate world-class talent for advancing China’s development in science and technology. To that end, Guo wrote the university’s motto, “Become politically sound and professionally competent; integrate theory with practice.”

Now, 55 years later, the USTC has developed into a comprehensive institution that remains faithful to its founding principles. It continues to cultivate national talent,break traditional boundaries and seize new opportunities in emerging fields of science. Its impressive accomplishments in academic research, particularly in thefields of quantum information, nanomaterials and space sciences, have played and will continue to play an important role in China’s growth as an international leader.

A humble beginning

 “It was not all plain sailing for the USTC. In the early years, the USTC did mostly theoretical research because of economic limitations,” says Chengzhi Peng of the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and the Department of Modern Physics, who was one of the co-authors of the Nature paper on longdistance quantum teleportation. “In 2001, my supervisor Jianwei Pan returned from Austria and brought back the concept of quantum communication. He joined hands with Guangcan Guo, Yongde Zhang and other senior members to start quantum physics research at the USTC, and the university has been very supportive of our project ever since.”

Peng’s main area of interest is quantum key distribution, a cryptographic protocol for securely communicating information from one party to another. As the laws of quantum mechanics forbid people without permission to retrieve the information,the technology makes it harder for people to intercept the communication.

Peng was one of the many people who helped the USTC realize free-space quantum teleportation and entanglement distribution over long distances. He first demonstrated entanglement distribution over 13 km in 2005, then quantum teleportation over 16 km in 2010, and then both quantum teleportation and entanglement distribution over 100 km in 2012. Peng believes that a quantum network is going to be the method of choice for communication in the future.

A quantum leap

The applications of quantum mechanics do not stop at just quantum communication. Jiangfeng Du of the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and the Department of Modern Physics, for example, is devoting his energy to the study of quantum computation — one of the hottest research areas in physics at the moment.

Magnetic resonance, a technology that is vital to the success of quantum computation, is Du’s primary area of interest. Quantum computers use electron or nuclear spins in solids as bits for storing information. These spins can become incoherent with time due to their coupling with the noisy environment and may lose information as a result. Magnetic resonance provides a precise way to manipulate spins and prolong their coherence time.

Du was one of the first people to use electron paramagnetic resonance for preserving spin coherence in malonic acid crystals. By firing a seven-pulse sequence into the crystal, he managed to prolong the coherence time of spins from 0.04 microseconds to 30 microseconds.The results of this study, published in Nature in October 2009, represent a significant step towards the realization of quantum computers.

Meeting national needs

The USTC often invests its time and money into a particular area because of national needs. China showcased its first human spaceflight mission in 2003 and its first unmanned lunar exploration in 2007. The next goal for the country is to send humans into deep space. However, the safety of spacecrafts and their onboard instruments can easily be jeopardized by energetic particles.

Yuming Wang of the Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences is a principal investigator studying coronal mass ejection (CME), an explosive event in the Sun’s atmosphere that sends out a shockwave of energetic particles. A single coronal mass ejection event typically releases particles that amount to 1025 joules of energy. If these particles are directed towards Earth, they can disrupt sensitive instruments and pose serious health threats to humans onboard the spacecraft.

Wang’s main focus is on the initiation, propagation and dynamic processes behind CME. The ultimate aim is to set up a warning system that could accurately predict space weather and prevent a national space disaster from happening. Recently, he studied the dynamics of a collision event between two CMEs. The results of his study made the cover story of the December 2012 issue of Nature Physics.

“Our project relies on interdisciplinary expertise from science and engineering. The USTC is one of only a few universities in China that can provide such expertise,” says Wang, who is currently developing a particle-detection instrument to measure plasma parameters, including velocity, temperature and density. “We are waiting for the approval from the Chinese government to use the instrument in future space missions.”

A nursery for talent

The USTC actively ventures into intersections of physical and life sciences. Longping Wen of the School of Life Sciences, for example, is currently investigating the biological effects of inorganic nanomaterials. “There are two interesting aspects in my research,” says Wen. “On one hand, we try to
understand the adverse effects of nanomaterials in cells and to find ways to minimize these adverse effects. On the other hand, we try to use toxic nanomaterials to target and kill cancer cells.”

Wen recently found that rare-earthbased nanocrystals could induce autophagy, a process by which cells degrade themselves. He demonstrated that by attaching a biological peptide coating onto the nanocrystal, he could form a composite with controllable activity in cells. The results of this study were published in the September 2012 issue of Nature Materials.

So far, Wen has used his nanocomposites to kill human cervical cancer cells, breast cancer cells and liver cancer cells.More importantly, he showed that his nanocomposites could enhance the toxicity of chemotherapeutic drugs in killing chemoresistant cancer cells.

“The USTC is situated in the small city of Hefei,” says Wen. “I chose to settle in the USTC because I believe the soil here (metaphorically speaking) is virgin and pure. There are fewer distractions here, so researchers can focus on their work. I was sure I could do something constructive at the USTC, and I was correct.”