Former ASML head scientist Lin Nan drives China’s latest EUV breakthrough
Research team achieves world-class results in photolithography research with solid-state laser-driven approach, paper shows

The team, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, was led by Lin Nan, previously research scientist at ASML in the Netherlands and also its competence owner of light sources for metrology.
In a call to investors on April 16, ASML chief executive Christophe Fouquet said that it was “always possible to generate some EUV light, but it would take many, many years for China to make an EUV machine”.
Lin returned to China in 2021 as part of the country’s overseas high-level recruitment drive and founded the advanced photolithography technology research group that was responsible for the paper.
Before joining ASML, Lin was mentored by Anne L’Huillier, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for physics and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as part of a scholarship awarded by the European Union’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme.