Engineers at the Research Institute of Physical and Chemical Engineering of Nuclear Industry, a Tianjin-based subsidiary of China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC), announced Monday they have achieved mass production of silicon-28 isotope with extremely high purity, ending China's reliance on foreign imports.
The products feature isotopic abundance exceeding 99.99 percent, with core performance metrics reaching internationally advanced levels. According to the institute, the breakthrough lays a material foundation for China's independent development of silicon-based quantum computing components and is also expected to support research in advanced-node semiconductors, high-precision navigation systems and metrological benchmarks.
Researchers described silicon-28 as "the purest silicon on Earth" — a stable isotope with zero nuclear spin that significantly suppresses environmental noise interference in quantum computing operations, making it a core material for silicon-based quantum chips.
The achievement represents a substantive advance in China's efforts to build a self-reliant stable isotope industrial system. Beyond quantum computing and national security applications, stable isotopes are also used in nuclear medical imaging, precision radiotherapy, nuclear security forensics, environmental tracing and fundamental physics research.
