Education and Work Experience

From September 2007 to July 2011, I attended the 00 class at the University of Science and Technology of China, majoring in Optical Information Science and Technology, and obtained a Bachelor's degree

From September 2011 to January 2017, I studied at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, majoring in theoretical physics and obtaining a PhD degree

From June 2017 to November 2019, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Quantum Physics and Quantum Informatics Department of the Beijing Research Center for Scientific Computing. From November 2019 to October 2021, I served as a Special Researcher for Foreigners at the Theoretical Quantum Physics Laboratory of the RIKEN Institute in Japan, sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). From November 2021 to March 2023, I held the position of Special Researcher at the RIKEN Centre for Quantum Computing (RQC) within the same institute. Since May 2023, I have been employed as a Pre-appointed Professor at the School of Physics and Optoelectronics, South China University of Technology.

Research directions

(1) Theories related to quantum information, quantum computing, and quantum metrology

(2) Quantum open systems and non-Hermitian physics

(3) Quantum information processing and quantum simulation in condensed matter physics

(4) Quantum information processing in non-equilibrium phases.

Key Achievements

He has conducted in-depth research in frontier scientific fields such as quantum metrology theory, quantum information processing in condensed matter physics, quantum resource theory, quantum open systems, quantum simulation and computation. He maintains close cooperation with well-known theoretical and experimental research groups both domestically and internationally, and has published over 40 SCI academic papers in internationally renowned journals such as Science (2 papers), Nature Physics (1 paper), Science Advances (1 paper), Physical Review Letters (10 papers), Nature Communications (1 paper), Physical Reviews (11 papers), Applied Physics Letters (1 paper), and Physics Reports (1 paper). Among them, he has authored/co-authored 10 papers (including one in Science and three in Physical Review Letters), and served as corresponding author in eight papers. The total citations of all published papers in SCI have reached 1968, with an H-index of 21. Five of these papers are still listed as Highly Cited Papers in SCI.

Representative paper results 

*Correspondence Author †Co-first Author 

[1] S. K. Zhao, Zi-Yong Ge, Zhongcheng Xiang, G. M. Xue, H. S. Yan, Z. T. Wang, Zhan Wang, H. K. Xu, F. F. Su, Z. H. Yang, He Zhang, Yu-Ran Zhang, Xue-Yi Guo, Kai Xu, Ye Tian, H. F. Yu, Dong-Ning Zheng, Heng Fan, and Shi-Ping Zhao, Probing operator spreading via Floquet engineering in a superconducting circuit, Physical Review Letters 129, 160602 (2022). 

[2] Yu-Ran Zhang, Yu Zeng, Tao Liu, Heng Fan, J. Q. You, and Franco Nori, Multipartite entanglement of the topologically ordered state in a perturbed toric code, Physical Review Research 4, 023144 (2022). 

[3] Qingling Zhu, Zheng-Hang Sun, Ming Gong, Fusheng Chen, Yu-Ran Zhang, Yulin Wu, Yangsen Ye, Chen Zha, Shaowei Li, Shaojun Guo, Haoran Qian, He-Liang Huang, Jiale Yu, Hui Deng, Hao Rong, Jin Lin, Yu Xu, Lihua Sun, Cheng Guo, Na Li, Futian Liang, Cheng-Zhi Peng, Heng Fan, Xiaobo Zhu, and Jian-Wei Pan, Observation of thermalization and information scrambling in a superconducting quantum processor, Physical Review Letters 128, 160502 (2022). 

[4] Kai Xu†,Yu-Ran Zhang†, Zheng-Hang Sun†, Hekang Li, Pengtao Song, Zhongcheng Xiang, Kaixuan Huang, Hao Li, Yunhao Shi, Chitong Chen, Xiaohui Song, Dongning Zheng, Franco Nori, H. Wang, and Heng Fan, Metrological characterizing non-Gaussian entangled states of superconducting qubits, Physical Review Letters 128, 150501 (2022). 

[5] Fusheng Chen, Zheng-Hang Sun, Ming Gong, Qingling Zhu, Yu-Ran Zhang, Yulin Wu, Yangsen Ye, Chen Zha, Shaowei Li, Shaojun Guo, Haoran Qian, He-Liang Huang, Jiale Yu, Hui Deng, Hao Rong, Jin Lin, Yu Xu, Lihua Sun, Cheng Guo, Na Li, Futian Liang, Cheng-Zhi Peng, Heng Fan, Xiaobo Zhu, and Jian-Wei Pan, Observation of strong and weak thermalization in a superconducting quantum processor, Physical Review Letters 127, 020602 (2021). 

[6] Qiujiang Guo, Chen Cheng, Zheng-Hang Sun, Zixuan Song, Hekang Li, Zhen Wang, Wenhui Ren, Hang Dong, Dongning Zheng, Yu-Ran Zhang, Rubem Mondaini, Heng Fan, and H. Wang, Observation of energy resolved many-body localization, Nature Physics 17, 234–239 (2021). 

[7] Kai Xu, Zheng-Hang Sun, Wuxin Liu, Yu-Ran Zhang, Hekang Li, Hang Dong, Wenhui Ren, Pengfei Zhang, Franco Nori, Dongning Zheng, Heng Fan, and H. Wang, Probing the dynamical phase transition with a superconducting quantum simulator, Science Advances 6, eaba4935 (2020). 

[8] Ya-Nan Lu†, Yu-Ran Zhang†, Gang-Qin Liu, Franco Nori, Heng Fan, and Xin-Yu Pan, Observing information backflow from controllable non-Markovian multichannels in diamond, Physical Review Letters 124, 210502 (2020). 

[9] Zi-Yong Ge, Yu-Ran Zhang*, Tao Liu, Si-Wen Li, Heng Fan, and Franco Nori, Topological band theory for non-Hermitian systems from the Dirac equation, Physical Review B 100, 054105 (2019). 

[10] Chao Song, Kai Xu, Hekang Li, Yu-Ran Zhang, Xu Zhang, Wuxin Liu, Qiujiang Guo, Zhen Wang, Wenhui Ren, Jie Hao, Hui Feng, Heng Fan, Dongning Zheng, Dawei Wang, H. Wang, and Shiyao Zhu, Generation of multi-component atomic Schrödinger cat states of up to 20 qubits, Science 365, 574–577 (2019). 

[11] Yangsen Ye, Zi-Yong Ge, Yulin Wu, Shiyu Wang, Ming Gong, Yu-Ran Zhang, Qingling Zhu, Rui Yang, Shaowei Li, Futian Liang, Jin Lin, Yu Xu, Cheng Guo, Lihua Sun, Chen Cheng, Nvsen Ma, Zi Yang Meng, Hui Deng, Hao Rong, Chao-Yang Lu, Cheng-Zhi Peng, Heng Fan, Xiaobo Zhu, and Jian-Wei Pan, Propagation and localization of collective excitations on a 24-qubit superconducting processor, Physical Review Letters 123, 050502 (2019). 

[12] Zhiguang Yan†, Yu-Ran Zhang†, Ming Gong†, Yulin Wu, Yarui Zheng, Shaowei Li, Can Wang, Futian Liang, Jin Lin, Yu Xu, Cheng Guo, Lihua Sun, Cheng-Zhi Peng, Keyu Xia, Hui Deng, Hao Rong, J. Q. You, Franco Nori, Heng Fan, Xiaobo Zhu, and Jian-Wei Pan, Strongly correlated quantum walks with a 12-qubit superconducting processor, Science 364, 753–756 (2019). 

[13] Tao Liu, Yu-Ran Zhang, Qing Ai, Zongping Gong, Kohei Kawabata, Masahito Ueda, and Franco Nori, Second-order topological phases in non-Hermitian systems, Physical Review Letters 122, 076801 (2019). 

[14] Yu-Ran Zhang, Yu Zeng, Heng Fan, J. Q. You, and Franco Nori, Characterization of topological states via dual multipartite entanglement, Physical Review Letters 120, 250501 (2018). 

[15] Kai Xu, Jin-Jun Chen, Yu Zeng, Yu-Ran Zhang, Cao Song, Wuxin Liu, Qiujiang Guo, Pengfei Zhang, Da Xu, Hui Deng, Keqiang Huang, H. Wang, Xiaobo Zhu, Dongning Zheng, and Heng Fan, Emulating many-body localization with a superconducting quantum processor, Physical Review Letters 120, 050507 (2018). [16] Gang-Qin Liu, Jian Xing, Wen-Long Ma, Ping Wang, Chang-Hao Li, Hoi Chun Po, Yu-Ran Zhang, Heng Fan, Ren-Bao Liu, and Xin-Yu Pan, Single-shot readout of a nuclear spin weakly coupled to a Nitrogen-Vacancy center at room temperature, Physical Review Letters 118, 150504 (2017). 

[17] Yu-Ran Zhang, Lian-He Shao, Yongming Li, and Heng Fan, Quantifying coherence in infinite dimensional systems, Physical Review A 93, 012334 (2016). 

[18] Gang-Qin Liu, Yu-Ran Zhang, Yan-Chun Chang, Jie-Dong Yue, Heng Fan, and Xin-Yu Pan, Demonstration of entanglement-enhanced phase estimation in solid, Nature Communications 6, 6726 (2015). 

[19] Yu-Ran Zhang, Jie-Dong Yue, and Heng Fan, Quantum metrology via repeated quantum nondemolition measurements in a photon box, Physical Review A 91, 022104 (2015). 

[20] Yu-Ran Zhang and Heng Fan, Quantum metrological bounds for vector parameter, Physical Review A 90, 043818 (2014).

Contact Information

E-mail：yuranzhang@scut.edu.cn