About Hefei National Laboratory

Hefei National Laboratory

The Hefei National Laboratory is China's first new-generation national laboratory, based in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, and devoted to quantum information science. It is the institutional centre of China's state-directed effort in quantum technology, bringing together research in quantum communication, quantum computing and quantum precision measurement within a single organisation that has its own legal personality, budget and governance. The University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) is its primary constructing institution, but the laboratory is a separate legal entity rather than a department of the university, and it is led operationally by the quantum physicist Pan Jianwei, a Chinese Academy of Sciences academician and executive vice president of USTC. Its campus, of about 49 hectares with roughly 480,000 square metres of planned building space and about 7 billion yuan of phase-one construction investment, is among the largest single-purpose quantum research sites in the world.

Origins in Hefei's quantum research community

The laboratory did not appear from nothing. Quantum research in Hefei reaches back to 1999, when USTC established its first quantum communication laboratory with support from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2001 Professor Guo Guangcan founded the CAS Key Laboratory of Quantum Information, China's first ministerial-level quantum research group. Pan Jianwei, who had completed his doctorate at the University of Vienna under Anton Zeilinger, returned to USTC full-time in 2008 and built a quantum physics division whose teams went on to produce a sequence of internationally reported results. This concentration of people and equipment in one city is the foundation on which the national laboratory was later built, and it explains why Hefei, rather than Beijing or Shanghai, became the home of China's quantum national laboratory.

From innovation academy to national laboratory

The decisive steps came in 2016 and 2017. After a visit by President Xi Jinping to USTC's Advanced Technology Research Institute in April 2016, at which Pan Jianwei described the future of quantum information science, quantum research was elevated into a national priority. Within months the Chinese Academy of Sciences Quantum Information and Quantum Technology Innovation Academy was established in Hefei, designed from the outset to operate as a national laboratory in all but name, with Pan Jianwei installed as its president in 2017. On 10 January 2017 the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Science and Technology jointly approved the Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, China's second comprehensive national science centre after Shanghai, with quantum information as its cornerstone. The laboratory was planned under the name National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences and was formally inaugurated around 2020-2021 under its present, geographically branded name, Hefei National Laboratory.

Legal status, governance and leadership

The laboratory's status as a separate legal entity distinguishes it from the older generation of pilot national laboratories, which were hosted inside universities or academy institutes without independent budgets. Reporting on the laboratory describes a governance structure overseen by representatives at national, provincial and city levels, reflecting its joint backing, and operational leadership by Pan Jianwei. The laboratory also helps to manage China's Sci-Tech Innovation 2030 programme in quantum technology, one of the country's major science and technology megaprojects, which gives it a coordinating role that extends well beyond its own campus. In November 2021 the laboratory was among the Chinese quantum entities added to United States export control lists, a step that underlined, from outside China, the strategic significance attached to its work.

Research direction one: quantum communication

Quantum communication is the laboratory tradition with the longest record. The Hefei teams led by Pan Jianwei developed the Micius quantum science satellite, launched in August 2016 as the world's first quantum satellite, and used it to demonstrate satellite-to-ground quantum key distribution and long-distance entanglement distribution. On the ground, the 2,032-kilometre Beijing-Shanghai quantum key distribution backbone linked the capital with Shanghai through Hefei, and the satellite and fibre systems were subsequently integrated into a space-ground quantum secure communication network. More recently, a team from the laboratory, working with USTC, the Jinan Institute of Quantum Technology and other partners, developed the Jinan-1 quantum microsatellite, launched on 27 July 2022, and demonstrated real-time quantum key distribution between the microsatellite and compact mobile ground stations of under 100 kilograms, including a link between Beijing and Stellenbosch in South Africa, cities separated by 12,900 kilometres, in work published in Nature in March 2025.

Research direction two: quantum computing

In quantum computing the Hefei ecosystem pursues two hardware families in parallel. The Jiuzhang series uses photons and performs Gaussian boson sampling; its successive generations reported quantum computational advantage on a specialised sampling task. The Zuchongzhi series uses superconducting circuits; Zuchongzhi 3.0, reported in Physical Review Letters in 2025, has 105 qubits and 182 couplers, with reported single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.90 per cent, two-qubit gate fidelity of 99.62 per cent and readout fidelity of 99.13 per cent, and was used for an 83-qubit, 32-cycle random circuit sampling experiment. Such advantage demonstrations are benchmarks rather than useful computations, and their classical simulation costs are estimates that specialists continue to debate, but they document the scale of machine the laboratory's teams can build and operate. A third, commercial line emerged from the same community in Origin Quantum's 72-qubit Origin Wukong superconducting computer, which began operating in January 2024.

Research direction three: quantum precision measurement

The laboratory's third stated direction, quantum precision measurement, also called quantum sensing or quantum metrology, applies quantum states and their sensitivity to physical quantities such as time, frequency, magnetic fields and rotation. It is the least publicly dramatised of the three directions, but it completes the laboratory's mandate: communication moves quantum information, computing processes it, and precision measurement uses quantum effects to sense the physical world more accurately than classical instruments allow. Together the three directions match the structure of China's national quantum programme, in which the laboratory in Hefei serves as the principal research hub.

Campus and scale

Accounts of the campus describe approximately 49 hectares, roughly 120 acres, with some 480,000 square metres of planned building space; one analysis gives 37 hectares for the first phase and about 7 billion yuan, around one billion US dollars, for phase-one construction. Western media have circulated much larger totals for Chinese quantum spending as a whole, but those figures combine laboratories, networks and satellites and are treated by careful analysts as unverified estimates rather than budgets. What is not in dispute is the physical scale: a purpose-built campus of this size, dedicated to a single scientific field, has few parallels internationally, and it was built alongside a new USTC presence intended in part to train the quantum workforce.

The surrounding quantum ecosystem

Around the laboratory, Hefei has developed a dense quantum industry cluster. Companies founded from the USTC research community, including QuantumCTek, founded in 2009 to commercialise quantum communication, Origin Quantum and CIQTEK, are headquartered along the stretch of road known locally as Quantum Avenue, where reporting counts more than 70, and in some accounts more than 80, quantum enterprises. The laboratory sits at the research end of this pipeline: fundamental results produced by its teams have repeatedly become the starting point for companies, networks and national infrastructure projects, which is one reason analysts describe it as the engine room of China's quantum push rather than simply one laboratory among many.

Place in China's national laboratory system

The Hefei National Laboratory belongs to the new generation of national laboratories created after China's 2020-2021 reforms, in which national laboratories were established as large, independently governed strategic research organisations in fields such as quantum information, network communications and artificial intelligence. It is described as the first of that generation and as one of China's first six new-generation national laboratories. USTC's position is unusual: the university is closely associated both with this laboratory and with the older Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, giving Hefei a concentration of national-level platforms matched in China only by Beijing.

Assessment and outlook

Judged by documented outputs, the laboratory's community has produced peer-reviewed results in journals including Nature, Science and Physical Review Letters across all three of its directions, from satellite quantum key distribution to 105-qubit superconducting processors. China's 15th Five-Year Plan period, covering 2026 to 2030, is reported to place quantum technology at the head of its list of future industries, with scalable quantum computers and an integrated space-to-earth quantum communication network named as goals, both of which fall squarely within this laboratory's mandate. The laboratory's longer-term test will be the transition its programme now faces, from record-setting demonstrations toward scalable, error-corrected machines and operational networks, but its institutional position, as China's first new-generation national laboratory with its own campus, budget and national coordinating role, is already established.