Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain | |
---|---|
Born |
Manresa, Catalonia, Spain |
11 October 1965
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.
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.