Ignacio Cirac is one of the five directors at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and head of the theory division, for which Flore Kunst works as a postdoc. As a Max-Planck-Harvard Postdoctoral Fellow, she develops new theories about non-equilibrium topological phases within the single-particle limit and in many-body systems. During this talk, they explore some basics of Quantum Physics, Quantum Computers, and in the end, the relevance of a proposal from 1995 by Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller published in the Physical Review Letter called “Quantum Computations with Cold Trapped Ions”. This was the first working concept for a Quantum Computer.
In Nature Reviews Physics from May 18th., 2020, Iulia Georgescu describes it as followed: "(...) when it comes to the first conception of how to actually build a quantum computer, one result stands out. On 15 May 1995, a paper by Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller was published in Physical Reviews Letters. It showed that atomic ions, trapped in a vacuum and cooled using lasers, could be used as qubits with which elementary quantum logic operations could be performed. The Cirac–Zoller paper turned quantum computing from a bold theoretical idea into an experimental race to build an actual device." (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-020-0189-1)