Recently, based on the cooperation between Professor Robert of Huzhou University and partners from University of the Witwatersrand, an academic paper entitled Non-local skyrmions as topologically resilient quantum entangled states of light has been carried on Nature Photonics, a subsidiary publication of the famous journal Nature, which proves a strong correlation between quantum entanglement and topology for the first time.

　　Skyrmion is a topologically stable field configuration, finding application in condensed-matter physics, acoustics and more recently, optics, but it has been realized as localized fields in all instances. Researchers of Huzhou University and University of the Witwatersrand report the first non-local quantum entangled state with a non-trivial topology that is skyrmionic in nature. The topology of the quantum wavefunction ensures that the skyrmion is robust to entanglement deformation, remaining intact until the entanglement itself vanishes. They make a theoretical introduction and experimentally demonstrate how quantum states map to quantum topology. This provides a new insight into the nature of entanglement and opens a new way to harness and control photon entanglement. These findings offer a promising avenue for the creation and preservation of quantum information and the applications of quantum computing.

　　Prof. Robert was introduced to Huzhou University in 2021 and selected as a scholar of the “Chang Jiang Scholars Program” of the Ministry of Education in China in 2023. In addition to the research of quantum gravity, he also actively applies the relevant basic theoretical research results to photonics.

　　Paper link：https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-023-01360-4