Purdue University Honors Tongcang Li with 2025 Bement Award for Pioneering Quantum Discoveries
Tongcang Li, a renowned figure in engineering and physics, has been chosen to receive the 2025 Arden L. Bement Jr. Award, Purdue University has announced. One of Purdue’s top faculty honors, this esteemed award was created especially to recognize exceptional recent contributions to pure and applied science and engineering. The award, which was created in memory of renowned scholar and former National Science Foundation director Arden L. Bement Jr., honors research that has the potential to improve science worldwide.
Tongcang Li is appointed to both the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the College of Science’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. In addition, he is the head of the Center for Quantum Technologies, an Industry-University Cooperative Research Center supported by the National Science Foundation. His selection for the Bement Award highlights his standing as one of the world’s foremost authorities on nonequilibrium thermodynamics, levitated quantum mechanics, and quantum sensing.
A Breakthrough in Quantum Information Science
A number of innovative experiments that have stretched the bounds of quantum information science are at the core of Tongcang Li recent praise. Li’s team accomplished a scientific first in 2025 when they discovered and managed single nuclear spins in two-dimensional (2D) materials. The study was published in the journal Nature. Because it creates completely new opportunities for utilizing nuclear spins in 2D materials as a platform for quantum technologies, this accomplishment is seen as a significant milestone.
Li and his colleagues achieved this by embedding the rare carbon-13 isotope into extremely thin hexagonal boron nitride layers. The group was able to obtain atomic-level details about the structure of the material they had created by using sophisticated magnetic resonance microscopy. Because it provides a “long coherence time” even at ambient temperature a rarity in quantum systems, which frequently need extremely low temperatures to function this new quantum platform is especially promising for future technologies. The platform is a very viable option for scalable quantum computing since it enables readily manipulable qubit-qubit interactions and can be created within a 2D solid state.
Advancing the Future of Quantum Sensing
Tongcang Li work has significant ramifications for how we measure the world around us and is not limited to the theoretical or the microscopic. His studies on spin qubit have opened up a new avenue for improving quantum sensing. His group obtained a record-high contrast for optically detectable magnetic resonance by combining plasmonic with 2D spin defects.
The employment of a gold-film microwave waveguide, which increased the photoluminescence of boron vacancies within boron nitride, was crucial to this achievement. The scientific community as a whole has embraced this particular approach for quantum sensing applications employing boron nitride spin defects since it has shown to be so successful.
Translating Lab Innovation to Industry
Professor Li’s dedication to ensuring that quantum research finds practical applications is one of his career’s defining traits. He presently has one patent that has been granted, and the Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization is working on two other technologies.
Major industry participants, such as Toyota Motor Corp. and a well-known semiconductor business, continue to collaborate with his research group. Specifically, the collaboration with Toyota aims to advance quantum sensing for battery and catalysis applications, which may result in cleaner chemical processes and more effective energy storage. In the meantime, he is developing specialized nanoparticle sensors for the semiconductor sector. The Purdue Computes effort, which combines the university’s advantages in semiconductors, quantum research, and physical AI, depends heavily on these partnerships.
A Legacy of “Top 10” Highlights
Li’s work in optomechanics has been acknowledged as some of the most impactful in the area of physics, and the Bement Award is just the most recent in a long line of honors. His creation of the fastest rotating and optically levitated nanoparticle was recognized as one of the “Top 10 Highlights of the Year” in all areas of physics by Physics magazine in 2018.
Li’s discovery on on-chip optical levitation utilizing a metalens was named one of the top 30 advances in optics for 2022 by Optics & Photonics News, continuing his run of success. Prestigious awards, such as the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Experimental Physics Investigators Award and the NSF work Award, have distinguished his previous work.
After learning about the 2025 Bement Award, Tongcang Li thanked his team and coworkers. “I am honored to receive the Bement Award and incredibly appreciative of my colleagues’ support and recognition,” Li said. “I also want to express my gratitude to my postdocs and students for their commitment and hard effort. Working at the quantum frontier and creating sensing technologies that enable applications it can’t even begin to envisage makes me feel privileged.
Purdue’s Excellence in Research
Li is among the esteemed group of Purdue University’s 2025 Excellence in Research Award honorees. Other honorees include Songlin Fei, who won the McCoy Award for his advancements in digital forestry, and Laura Murray-Kolb, who won the Aday Award for her work in mother and child health.
Purdue University, one of the top ten public universities in the US, keeps highlighting its goal of “discovering, disseminating, and deploying knowledge” on a large scale. The institution is dedicated to affordability while pursuing “the next giant leap” in scientific research, and it has over 106,000 students and a 14-year tuition freeze on its main campus.
Upcoming Award Lecture
At the Excellence in Research Award Lectures, Professor Li will speak directly to the Purdue community and the general public. The talk will be held in the Purdue Memorial Union’s East and West Faculty lounges on May 2026, Although the community is welcome to attend, those who want to do so must register.
The “extraordinary properties of material defects” that Tongcang Li investigates and how they may influence computing and sensing in the coming decades will be examined in greater detail in this talk.
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