Scientists John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for “the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit,” the award-giving body said on Tuesday.
“This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has provided opportunities for developing the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum sensors,” said a statement accompanied by the prize’s announcement from Stockholm.
Clarke conducted his research at the University of California-Berkeley, Martinis at the University of California-Santa Barbara; and Devoret at Yale University and also at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Devoret, born in France, and Martinis have each been affiliated with Google’s Quantum A.I. Lab in recent years.
“To put it mildly, it was the surprise of my life,” Clarke, who was born in England, said upon getting the call confirming the honour. He called collaborators Devoret and Martinis “brilliant people” whose contributions “were just overwhelming.”
“I’m speaking on my cellphone, and I suspect that you are too, and one of the underlying reasons that the cell phone works is because of all this work,” Clarke added.
‘The foundation of all digital technology’
Quantum mechanical behaviours are well-studied at the level of the incredibly small — atoms and sub-atomic particles — but are often seen as bizarre and non-intuitive compared with classical physics and its far larger scale.
The Nobel winners carried out experiments in the mid-1980s with an electronic circuit built of superconductors and demonstrated that quantum mechanics could also influence everyday objects under certain conditions.
“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises. It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology,” Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said.
Quantum technology is already ubiquitous, with transistors in computer microchips an everyday example.
The Nobel awards, which are also handed out for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, literature and peace, come with a prize amount of 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.6 million Cdn).
The prize for chemistry will be awarded Wednesday, literature on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The economics prize will be announced Oct. 13.
The Nobel Prizes are presented to the laureates on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel’s death.
The physics prize has been awarded to 229 laureates since 1901. British Canadian scientist Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto and American scientist John Hopfield of Princeton University were honoured with the 2024 physics prize for discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning within artificial neural networks.
