Research Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria).
Peter Zoller (Innsbruck, Austria; 1952) earned a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Innsbruck in 1977. After various fellowships and visiting positions in the United States, New Zealand and France, in 1991 he became Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado (United States). In 1994 he accepted a professorship at the University of Innsbruck, where he has worked ever since. From 1995 to 1999, he headed its Institute of Theoretical Physics (where he is now professor), and from 2001 to 2004 was its Vice Dean of Studies. Since 2003, he has added to his appointments that of Research Director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Zoller has taught at such prestigious international centers as Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the United States, the University of Leiden (Netherlands), Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany), the Technion (Israel), the University of Brussels or the University of Science and Technology of China.
After winning the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award jointly with Ignacio Cirac, both men went on to receive the Wolf Prize in Physics (2013), considered the second most important after the Nobel Prize, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute (2010, along with David Wineland). Zoller also has a long list of individual distinctions; among the most recent, the Herbert Walther Prize of the Optical Society of America (2016), the Blaise Pascal Medal in Physics (2011), the Niels Bohr/UNESCO God Medal (2005) and the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society (2005).
He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Spanish Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea.
Speech
Basic Sciences, 1 st edition
“We are entering a new world, a microscopic world which we are learning to manipulate and control, and where we are encountering new laws of nature”. This could be the opening of a science fiction film. But no. The words belong to physicist Ignacio Cirac (Spain, 1965) and refer to the research being done in the world of the infinitesimal, at the atomic and molecular scale. In the realm of quantum mechanics.
The last great revolution in physics began around a century ago and posed a huge challenge to human intuition and creativity. Could anyone have predicted that the same thing could be in two places at once? Or that two objects far apart and physically unconnected could interact so closely that a change in one is instantly mirrored in the other? Confronted with phenomena that contradict the version of the world we receive through our senses, our first reaction is inevitably disbelief. And yet that is how things are. The laws that govern the quantum universe often clash with our common-sense view of reality, but are nonetheless strictly observed in nature. Today’s physicists have a wealth of evidence to prove that quantum mechanics is hard fact, and are now learning to exploit its possibilities.
Peter Zoller and Ignacio Cirac are past masters at this particular art. And their work together could open the door to the quantum computer of the future; a revolutionary machine able to process data on a scale undreamt of in the past. A computer that runs using quantum mechanics could for instance, crack open the codes encrypting information, improve the accuracy of the mathematical simulations used for everything from predicting climate change to designing new materials, and, in all likelihood, crunch its way through some of the problems that today’s scientists find irresolvable, like deducing the three-dimensional structure of a protein based on its sequence of amino acids.
Zoller and Cirac’s collaboration dates back to the beginning of the 1990s. At the time, scientists were already speculating about building a quantum computer, but no one was sure if it could actually be done. Cirac was investigating the physical properties of ions – electrically charged atoms – and realized that some of these properties might hold the key to the long-sought machine. And what he then discovered, together with Peter Zoller, produced not one but two strides forward: not only was the quantum computer a real possibility – no fundamental laws ruled it out – but there was also a way to build one. The two scientists based their conjectures on what are known as “ion traps”, in which electrically charged and cooled atoms are trapped by an electric field and manipulated with lasers. The captive ions would then act as q-bits, the basic data units of quantum computing.
This research was written up in a joint paper published in 1995 by the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters: “Quantum Computation with Cold Trapped Ions,” which has since become one of the most widely cited articles in atomic physics and quantum optics. Shortly after it appeared, a series of laboratories worldwide began to experiment successfully with Zoller and Cirac’s ideas. In fact some small-scale prototypes have already been built based on the ion trap idea, and this technique still holds out the best promise for quantum computation.
But Zoller and Cirac’s collaboration did not end there. Both men have embarked on the study of a new state of matter called the “Bose-Einstein condensate,” in which atoms cooled to the lowest temperatures ever achieved – a billionth of a degree above absolute zero or -273 degrees Centigrade – oscillate in unison and coalesce into a single wave. Here too, Zoller and Cirac have produced visionary and ground-breaking work, which has not only built new bridges between quantum optics and solid state physics, but has also, crucially, paved the way for later discoveries.
The society that stands to benefit from all this research is avid for results. And a question both scientists are frequently asked is: when will we see a fully operating quantum computer? Peter Zoller has a short answer ready: “That is certainly the goal, though we still have a long way to go.” But the longer answer looks to the means and not just the ends. Ignacio Cirac, in particular, foresees a future rich in new developments. “We must remember that the road to quantum computation is paved with exciting phenomena which we can analyze using the physics we have today, and which will produce even more surprising results. That is always the way with basic research; you never know what you are going to discover. All we know is that we are entering a new world and what we do find is going to be important”.
Peter Zoller is full professor at the University of Innsbruck and, since 2003, scientific director at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Ignacio Cirac has headed the Theory Division at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, since 2001. Each has pursued his own separate research in the last decade, though finding time for occasional collaborations. Both men have over two hundred articles to their names in leading journals, but what colleagues single out is something unrecorded on their resumes: their enormous creativity.
