Guo Yanliang, a 33-year-old physicist and former debate champion, has left a prominent European quantum laboratory to establish a research group at Renmin University of China. Returning this year as an associate professor, Guo is building an ultracold atom experiment platform, citing a research environment that better aligns with his long-term scientific goals.
From International Debate Stages to Quantum Laboratories
Before building quantum hardware, physicist Guo Yanliang sharpened his communication abilities in international debating competitions and on online variety shows. That background shaped his perspective on academic inquiry, viewing laboratory work through the lens of structured discourse. The research environment here is more in line with my research characteristics,
Guo noted when explaining his career shift to DeepTech, the Chinese branch of MIT Technology Review, last month.
His academic credentials include published papers in high-profile journals such as Science and Nature, alongside recognition on the Innovators Under 35 China
list. Rather than remaining at a top-tier European quantum facility, the researcher opted to relocate to Beijing because China offered better support for his long-term research goals.
Building the Ultracold Atom Platform at Renmin University
At Renmin University of China, Guo holds an associate professor position. His primary institutional mandate involves constructing an advanced ultracold atom experiment platform.
The Long Horizon of Quantum Computing Investments
For quantum technologies, you have to be a good guesser because the bets are long term.
Building a quantum computer could allow it to design molecules and materials, model the reactions that feed and power the world, and answer questions that no classical machine can—such as how electrons behave inside high-temperature superconductors. In five years or less, a quantum computer will do something that someone needs and no ordinary computer can do, with a solution that changes how we look at the world. Give it a few more years, and a wholly new form of computing could be deployed worldwide, spreading fast because it builds off investments in chips and artificial intelligence, is reached through the cloud, and works everywhere when it works.
For that to happen, governments need to fund long-horizon science that no company will pay for, help identify what is worth buying, and become demanding customers in fields ranging from scientific discovery to defence. Companies speed the process along, and universities train the next generation.
Building a functional quantum machine remains an immense engineering challenge. Quantum computers run on qubits (bits of quantum information), and the hard part is not the number needed, but how to control them. Quantum computers need to manage tens of thousands to millions of qubits at once, each with its own wiring. While your laptop’s data encoding is error-free, a quantum computer’s is not; the cure is quantum error correction, which uses redundancy to build a few reliable qubits from many shaky ones.
Overcoming Hardware Hurdles Through Engineering Innovation
The silicon processor described in Nature (Members of the HRL Quantum Team and collaborators. Nature 655, 1154–1159; 2026) shows how far the field has come, featuring encoded qubits that are actively error-suppressed, run by a single cryogenic control chip, and connected by a superconducting ribbon cable. These modern configurations grew from seeds planted years ago at DARPA, when workers wrapped fittings in Teflon tape and tied down wiring with dental floss as a duct tape solution for isolating qubits in temperatures colder than those in deep space.
As laboratories worldwide tackle these hardware barriers, the choice of leading technology candidate keeps changing. Neutral atoms and photons, for example, were left for dead because of scalability concerns—until academia revived them and the market embraced them.
