The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday that the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis for their discoveries in quantum mechanics.
According to Olle Eriksson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, “It is wonderful to celebrate how century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises. It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics underlies all digital technology.”
The award was given to these scientists "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electrical circuit."
Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis conducted experiments with an electrical circuit that demonstrated both quantum mechanical tunneling and quantized energy levels in a system large enough to hold in the hand, it was reported.
It was also highlighted that this year's Nobel Prize in Physics has provided opportunities to develop the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum sensors.
Reviews emphasize that the laureates' experiments took quantum mechanical effects from a microscopic to a macroscopic scale, and the transistors in computer microchips are an example of the established quantum technology that surrounds us.
Clarke, a British national, is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley; Devoret, a Frenchman, works at Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Martinis, an American, is at UC Santa Barbara.
Historically, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded 118 times to 226 laureates between 1901 and 2024.
The Swedish Academy announces its winners every October, and this week it will reveal the Chemistry, Literature, and Nobel Peace Prize winners, while the Economics Prize will be announced on October 13.
With information from Prensa Latina
