Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain, born on October 11, 1965, is professionally known as Ignacio Cirac. He is a Spanish physicist who helped develop the field of quantum computing and quantum information theory. In 2013, he received the Wolf Prize in Physics.
Career
In 1991, Cirac moved to the United States to work as a research scientist with Peter Zoller at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. From 1991 to 1996, he taught physics at the Ciudad Real Faculty of Chemistry, University of Castilla-La Mancha.
In 1996, Cirac became a professor at the Institut für Theoretische Physik in Innsbruck, Austria. In 2001, he became the director of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, where he leads the Theory Division. At the same time, he was named an honorary professor at the Technical University of Munich.
Since 2002, Cirac has served as a distinguished visiting professor and research advisor at ICFO, the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona. He has been part of research teams at universities including Harvard, Technical University of Munich, Hamburg, UCSB, Hannover, Bristol, Paris, CEA/Saclay, École Normale Supérieure, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His research focuses on quantum optics, the quantum theory of information, and quantum many-body physics. His work with Peter Zoller on ion trap quantum computation made experimental quantum computation possible. His research on optical lattices helped start the field of quantum simulation. He has made important contributions in quantum information theory, degenerate quantum gases, quantum optics, and renormalization group methods. As of 2017, Cirac has published over 440 articles in top scientific journals and is one of the most frequently cited authors in his fields. He has been considered a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Other activities
- Telefónica, served on the board of directors since 2016
- Fundación La Caixa, served on the advisory council since 2015
- Annalen der Physik, served on the advisory board since 2012
- Fundación BBVA, served on the scientific committee since 2010
Honors and awards
In 2003, Cirac was chosen as a Fellow of the American Physical Society. In 2017, he became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
He has received many awards. Important ones include the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category, which he shared with Peter Zoller, and The Franklin Institute's 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, which he shared with David J. Wineland and Peter Zoller. He was given the Wolf Prize in Physics with Peter Zoller in 2013. In 2018, he received the Max Planck Medal from the German Physical Society and the Micius Quantum Prize.
In 2023, he was honored with the first La Vanguardia Prize in the "Innovation" category.