Juan I. Cirac

Biosketch

Born in Manresa, Spain. In 1988, he graduated in Theoretical Physics from the Complutense University, Madrid (Spain), and gained his PhD in 1991. After a postdoc at JILA (Boulder, US) and becoming Associate Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) in 1996. Since 2001 he is director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching (Germany). He carries out theoretical research in quantum computing, quantum optics and many-body physics. For his work he has been awarded several prizes, among them the Prince of Asturias, the BBVA frontiers of knowledge, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Wolf Prize, and the Max-Planck Medal. He is a member of the Spanish, Bavarian, and German Academies of Sciences, and holds nine honorary doctor degrees.

Research Interests

As an expert in quantum computation and its applications, the focus of his research is the quantum theory of information. With his colleague Peter Zoller, he has made the first proposals to build quantum computers and quantum simulators using ions, neutral atoms, and other physical systems. He also discovered how cold atoms experiments can be used to solve problems in material science, high-energy physics, and quantum chemistry. He developed several quantum algorithms to solve a variety of problems with quantum computers. In the field of quantum communication, he introduced the concept of quantum repeaters, proposed the first ways of implementing them with atoms and photons, and provided the first security proof for continuous variable quantum cryptography. He has also introduced basic concepts and techniques in quantum information theory and, in particular, in entanglement theory. With several collaborators, he introduced projected entangled-pair states, which are now widely used in classical computational physics. Additionally, he developed a theory of tensor networks, and related the entanglement in a many-body quantum system with the possibility of describing it efficiently.