Cirac 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, Cirac became professor in the Institut für Theoretische Physik in
Innsbruck, Austria, and in 2001 he became a director of the
Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in
Garching, Germany, where he heads the Theory Division. At the same time, he was appointed
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. 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 fields of quantum information theory, degenerated quantum gases, quantum optics, and renormalization group methods. As of 2017 Juan Ignacio Cirac has published more than 440 articles in the most prestigious journals and is one of the most cited authors in his fields of research. He has been named among others as a possible candidate to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. == Other activities ==