Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain

Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain
Born (1965-10-11) 11 October 1965
Manresa, Catalonia, Spain
Residence Germany
Nationality Spain
Fields Physicist
Institutions Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics
Alma mater Complutense University of Madrid
Notable students Frank Verstraete,
Guifré Vidal
Known for Trapped ion quantum computer
Tensor network states
Notable awards Prince of Asturias Award (2006)
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2008)
Wolf Prize in Physics (2013)

Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain (born 11 October 1965) is a Spanish physicist. He is one of the pioneers of the field of quantum computing and quantum information theory. He is the recipient of the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award in technical and scientific research.

Biography

Juan Ignacio Cirac is one of the most famous Spanish physicists. He graduated from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1988 and moved to the United States in 1991 to work as a postdoctoral scientist with Peter Zoller in the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in University of Colorado at Boulder. Between 1991 and 1996, he was teaching physics in the Ciudad Real Faculty of Chemistry, University of Castilla-La Mancha.

In 1996, he became professor in the Institut für Theoretische Physik in Innsbruck, Austria, and became the Director of the Theoretical Division of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, in 2001. At the same time, he became a Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Munich. He is a Distinguished Visiting Professor and Research Advisor at ICFO - the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona since its foundation in 2002. He has been a member of research teams at the universities of Harvard, Technical University of Munich, Hamburg, UCSB, Hannover, Bristol, Paris, CEA/Saclay, École Normale Supérieure, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His research is focused on quantum optics, the quantum theory of information and quantum many-body physics. According to his theories, quantum computing will revolutionize the information society and lead to much more efficient and secure communication of information. His joint work with Peter Zoller on ion trap quantum computation opened up the possibility of experimental quantum computation, and his joint work on optical lattices jumpstarted the field of quantum simulation. He has also made seminal contributions in the field of degenerated quantum gases, quantum optics and renormalization group methods. Juan Ignacio Cirac has published more than 300 articles in the most prestigious journals and is one of the most cited authors in his fields of research.

Ignacio Cirac has been granted multiple awards, notable ones being the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category ex aequo with Peter Zoller, and The Franklin Institute's 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics (jointly with David J. Wineland and Peter Zoller). He was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics with Peter Zoller in 2013.

External links

Lectures and panels

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