Xue Qikun, China’s first Fritz London Memorial Prize winner, highlighted the role of basic research for achieving China’s self-reliance in science and technology when delivering an online report to the postponed award ceremony last week.

Working as President of the Southern University of Science and Technology based in Shenzhen, South China, Xue reviewed the process of the award-winning discovery in his online speech, and introduced China’s notable achievements and global contribution to basic research and core technologies development over the past two decades.

He noted that the key for China to become self-reliant in science and technology is to strengthen basic research and achieve breakthroughs in core technologies.

Xue was awarded the Fritz London Memorial Prize in February 2020 for his pioneering work on the experimental discovery of the quantum anomalous Hall effect in a magnetic topological insulator.

The prize, set up in 1957, awarded every three years to recognize scientists worldwide who have made outstanding contributions to advances in the field of Low Temperature Physics.

Xue, also a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, became the first Chinese scientist and the second from Asia to win the award.

His discovery builds a foundation for practical applications of topological quantum states in the future, which is expected to accelerate the development of low-power-consumption electronics and quantum computation. The scientific breakthrough will revolutionize information communications technology in people’s daily life.

The other two winners of the prize 2020 are Professor V. Vinokur of Argonne National Laboratory, USA, and Professor Frank Steglich of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Germany.

So far, more than 50 physicists across the globe, including 11 Nobel Prize winners in Physics, such as Dr. Lev Landau and Dr. John Bardeen, have been awarded the highest honor in LTP.

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the award ceremony was postponed till this year’s International Conference on Low Temperature Physics (LT29) in Sapporo, Japan, on August 18, 2022.