By Matin Durrani
China continues to make great progress in physics, with new facilities and projects starting up all the time. Just this week we’ve reported on plans to build a new neutrino experiment at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory (CJPL). The world’s deepest lab, it’s located under a mountain – with about 2400 m of rock cover – in China’s south-western Sichuan province.
Physics World has long kept a close eye on the progress of the physics community in China and in fact we published our first ever special report on the country in 2011. Since then, however, so much more has been going on that we felt it’s time to make a return trip and will be producing another special report in September this year to give you further insights into physics in China.
With the help of colleagues at the Beijing office of IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World, we’ll be touring key facilities and labs later in the spring to gather material for that report. So it was very timely that on Sunday I travelled to London for a meeting with senior figures from Chinese physics, including Wenlong Zhan, who is vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and current president of the Chinese Physical Society (CPS).
The meeting gave me a chance to find out from Professor Zhan and his colleagues some of the latest developments in Chinese physics. It also let Paul Hardaker, chief executive of the Institute of Physics (IOP, which owns IOP Publishing), explain the work of the IOP in supporting the Chinese physics community, such as publishing key physics journals, including several from the CPS, such as Chinese Physics B.
At the meeting, I also mentioned that last year’s Physics World Breakthrough of the Year award went to Jian-Wei Pan and Chaoyang Lu of the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, for quantum teleportation of two properties at the same time.
If you have thoughts about people or places for the Physics World team to visit in China, please do let me know.
