Guifre Vidal is a senior faculty member at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada since 2011. His work, at the interface between quantum information and condensed matter, has lead the development of a theory of many body entanglement and of the tensor network formalism to efficiently describe many body wave functions. Vidal has been awarded a Federation Fellowship (Australian research Council, 2006–2011) and a Distinguished Research Chair (Perimeter Institute, 2010–2011).
Vidal’s main research contributions include: the first algorithm to efficiently simulate dynamics in one-dimensional lattice systems (TEBD, 2004) using a matrix product state (MPS), as well as the proposal of the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA, 2007), a tensor network for quantum critical systems. Tensor networks, including MPS and MERA, are currently used in many disciplines, from condensed matter to quantum chemistry, and from quantum information to string theory.