Friday, May 29, 2026

Some Top Quantum Researchers in Japan

 A while ago, I created a blog post on quantum architecture researchers in Japan, mostly young ones and all very good. But I'm often asked more generally about quantum research and researchers in Japan, so here is a list to refer to. Note that it's ordered by Google Scholar h-index (in parentheses; taken when I wrote this blog post -- we're not being scientific here), which is almost inarguably a terrible way to do it, but I don't have a better method at hand. h-index and influence in Japan both correlate with longevity and probably with other factors such as gender.

A lot of other factors influence publications and citations, including ability to both publish and speak in English, but conversely non-native Japanese people are at a disadvantage in the gossip and influence network inside Japan, including hearing about and ultimately influencing the creation of funding opportunities, so there are plusses and minuses.

A few important people don't have Google Scholar profiles (at least not public ones), so I have dropped them into this list entirely qualitatively roughly where I think they belong. Note also that a few of these people don't fully curate their Scholar profiles and so may have either extraneous or missing publications.

(Todai = University of Tokyo)

(Yeah, when you get to the bottom of the list, I've included our own younger people, whom I know better than the younger people in other places. There are a lot more researchers with h-indices in the 10-25 range. I picked some I like. So sue me.)
(I think the top 20 or so on this list is a relatively complete list of the senior people in the field here; if I've forgotten anybody, let me know!)

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I was surprised thas Masahito Ueda is not in the top positions!
Another big one is Masahito Hayashi, but I'm not sure if he is still affiliated to a Japanese university.
Other names I was expecting to see (some of these may or may not fit depending on how you define "quantum", this list is biased towards quantum sensing and related fields):
Francesco Buscemi, Jason Twamley, Holger Hofmann, Takahiro Sagawa, Masahiro Kitagawa (not sure if he is still active), Akio Fujiwara, Ryusuke Hamazaki, Hiroyasu Tajima, Hayata Yamasaki, Masashi Ban, Jun Suzuki, Satoya Imai

Sunday, June 7, 2026 at 6:21:00 PM GMT+9

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