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Juan Sasturain Edit Profile

physicist university professor

Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain is a Spanish physicist.

Education

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.

Career

He is one of the pioneers of the field of quantum computing and quantum information theory. Juan Ignacio Cirac is one of the most famous Spanish physicists. Between 1991 and 1996, he was teaching physics in the Ciudad Real Faculty of Chemistry, University of Castilla-Louisiana 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.

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. He was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics with Peter Zoller in 2013.

Achievements

  • He is the recipient of the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award in technical and scientific research. Ignacio Cirac has been granted multiple awards, notable ones being the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award, the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria 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).

Membership

He has been a member of research teams at the universities of Harvard, Technical University of Munich, Hamburg, UCSB, Hannover, Bristol, Paris, Center for Educational Affairs/Saclay, École Normale Supérieure, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.