Physics World magazine’s “2015 Breakthrough of the Year” award went to Professor Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang’s team at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. Their team was recognized for the “fundamental importance” of their research into quantum physics. Never in the history of China has a government taken so much interest and invested so many resources in scientific research and technological development as the current one, said historian Chen Pu, who is also Assistant Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute for the History of Natural Science in Beijing. The work by another team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) ranked third in the magazine’s list of the top 10 breakthroughs of the year. They were among the first scientists to discover Weyl fermions, a so-called “ghost particle” that scientists believe could replace electrons as carriers of information in computers of the future. In China, government expenditure on research and development (R&D) has been increasing at the rate of over 20% a year for more than a decade. In the United States, budget cuts have resulted in an annual decline of up to 9% in scientific funding since 2009, the South China Morning Post reports.