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Dr Chunyu Guo Wins 2026 Kurti Prize for Quantum Materials Work

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October 13, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

Dr. Chunyu Guo, Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, will receive the 2026 Nicholas Kurti Science Prize for his work with Kagome metals. The award recognizes Dr. Guo’s discovery of many-body quantum coherence in strain-free microstructures under high magnetic fields, advancing understanding of correlated topological matter. “I am truly honored to receive the Nicholas Kurti Science Prize and to join its distinguished group of past recipients,” said Dr. Guo, emphasizing the importance of the conditions central to his research.

Kagome Metals Research Reveals Many-Body Quantum Coherence

Dr. Guo’s research team demonstrated long-range quantum coherence in the normal state of the kagome metal CsV3Sb5, revealing collective electron behavior over distances exceeding conventional expectations even at relatively high temperatures. The team’s approach involved meticulously crafted microstructures to minimize strain, a critical factor in isolating and observing these subtle quantum effects under strong magnetic fields, Nicholas Kurti Science Prize says. This discovery builds on Dr. Guo’s work since 2022, where he developed a microstructure-based transport approach to investigate correlated electronic order within kagome metals.

This technique allowed his group to reveal non-reciprocal transport, driven by an underlying chiral electronic state, and to determine that the observed symmetry breaking is spontaneous. Establishing kagome metals as highly tunable systems, this finding resolved a long-standing question regarding the origin of their unique electronic properties. Dr. Guo also contributed to understanding unconventional superconductivity in UTe2, a material exhibiting unusual magnetic field-dependent behavior.

His group showed that the superconducting characteristics of UTe2 change significantly with applied magnetic field, providing experimental data for refining theoretical models of this complex material. A representative from Quantum Design stated, “It is always a pleasure to award the Nicholas Kurti prize, and we are proud to support young scientists such as Dr. Guo.” They added that his work exemplifies the spirit of the prize and highlights the importance of curiosity-driven and conceptually bold research in advancing the field of quantum materials science and condensed matter physics. Dr. Guo’s 2024 European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant of €1.5 million over five years will further support exploration of quantum functionality in kagome metals for frustrated electronics development.

His work exemplifies the spirit of this prize, and underpins the importance of curiosity-driven and conceptually bold research in advancing the field of quantum materials science and condensed matter physics.

Matthew Martin, Managing Director at Quantum Design Oxford

Dr. Guo’s Career Trajectory and ERC Starting Grant

This award builds on a trajectory that began with doctoral research, where early work indicated topological transport could endure even with strong electron interactions. Following this, Dr. Guo accepted a postdoctoral position at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, focusing on novel topological responses at the mesoscopic scale. His work has been highly cited and published in leading physics journals including Nature and Nature Physics.

The ERC grant, specifically for the project “Free-Kagome,” will allow Dr. Guo to further investigate the potential of these materials for frustrated electronics. He credits Professor Philip J. W. Moll and Dr. Carsten Putzke with providing guidance and support throughout his eight years in Europe, alongside his PhD supervisor, Professor Huiqiu Yuan and other collaborators.

I am truly honored to receive the Nicholas Kurti Science Prize and to join its distinguished group of past recipients. This recognition is especially meaningful to me because it highlights the importance of low temperatures and high magnetic fields – conditions central to my scientific career.

Dr Chunyu Guo, W2 Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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