Ignacio Cirac, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, near Munich, has been awarded the 2026 Isaac Newton Medal and Prize, Physics World reported. The medal is the Institute of Physics' highest honour and is given annually to a physicist of any nationality for world-leading contributions to the field.
Cirac, born in Spain in 1965, is one of the founding figures of quantum information science — the field that asks what computation, communication and simulation look like when the rules of quantum mechanics are treated as resources rather than nuisances. The paper he wrote with Peter Zoller in 1995, proposing that a string of trapped ions could serve as a quantum computer and that lasers could implement quantum logic gates on them, is among the most cited in the field and set the direction for an entire experimental programme. Ion-trap machines built on that idea are today among the leading platforms in the race towards useful quantum computers.
His later work ranges across quantum simulation, tensor-network methods for describing complex quantum states, and the theory of quantum error correction — the machinery that has to work before any quantum machine can be trusted to run long calculations. He shared the Wolf Prize in Physics with Zoller in 2013, and has held his post at the Max Planck Institute since 2001 while also teaching in Munich.
The award lands at a fraught moment for the field. Quantum computing has become one of the most heavily funded areas of physical science, yet the machines that exist today remain noisy and small; the theoretical scaffolding Cirac helped build still decides which directions are worth the money.
