🏆 Nobel Physics 2025: When Quantum Leaps Became Handheld
What if you could hold quantum weirdness in your hand? The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics honors three scientists who proved exactly that: quantum tunneling and energy quantization, not in atoms, but in a device the size of a fingertip.
🔬 From Microscopic Mystery to Macroscopic Reality
Quantum mechanics is notorious for its strangeness: electrons can tunnel through walls, exist in multiple states at once, and exchange energy in sharp quanta. For decades, physicists assumed these effects vanish at larger scales.
Then came the breakthrough.
In the mid-1980s, John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis built superconducting circuits with Josephson junctions—superconductors separated by an ultra-thin insulator. These devices behaved like giant quantum particles, showing:
- Macroscopic quantum tunneling — entire circuits could “tunnel” between states, bypassing classical barriers.
- Energy quantization — the circuits absorbed or emitted energy in discrete jumps, mirroring atomic behavior.
As the Nobel Committee put it, they revealed “quantum physics in action, in a circuit big enough to be held in the hand.” (Nobel Prize Press Release)
👨🔬 Meet the Laureates
John Clarke
- Born 1942 in Cambridge, UK.
- PhD in Physics, University of Cambridge (1968).
- Longtime professor at UC Berkeley, renowned for developing SQUIDs and pushing superconducting electronics forward. (UC Berkeley News)
Michel H. Devoret
- Born 1953 in France.
- Postdoc with Clarke in the 1980s; co-led Nobel-winning experiments.
- Now professor at Yale, co-appointed at UCSB, and Chief Scientist of Quantum Hardware at Google Quantum AI. (Google Blog)
John M. Martinis
- Born 1958 in the U.S.
- PhD at UC Berkeley under Clarke, thesis on macroscopic tunneling in Josephson junctions.
- Later led Google’s quantum hardware team, famous for the “quantum supremacy” milestone. (Reuters)
🌍 Why It Matters
Their discovery reshaped physics and technology:
- Quantum computing: Their circuits became prototypes for superconducting qubits, the backbone of Google, IBM, and Yale’s quantum processors.
- Quantum sensing: Ultra-precise measurements of fields, time, and gravity are now possible thanks to these principles.
- Classical–quantum bridge: Their work blurred the line between the everyday world and the quantum domain.
Still, the road ahead is steep: qubits decohere quickly, error correction is hard, and practical large-scale quantum computers are not here yet. As Devoret himself admitted:
“I thought it was a prank … The quantum computer is not here yet.” (Le Monde)
📘 Glossary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Superconductor | Material that carries current with zero resistance below a critical temperature. |
| Josephson junction | Two superconductors separated by a thin insulator where quantum tunneling of Cooper pairs occurs. |
| Macroscopic quantum tunneling | Quantum tunneling happening not in a single particle but in a collective system (like a circuit). |
| Energy quantization | The principle that energy changes happen in discrete “quanta” rather than smoothly. |
| Qubit | Quantum version of a bit, capable of superposition and entanglement. |
| Decoherence | Loss of quantum behavior when a system interacts with its environment. |
🔗 Sources (validated)
- Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 — Press Release
- Nature: Groundbreaking quantum-tunnelling experiments win Nobel
- Reuters: Clarke, Devoret, Martinis win Nobel Prize in Physics
- Le Monde: Michel Devoret, Nobel Laureate Interview
- Google Blog: Michel Devoret Nobel
- UC Berkeley News: John Clarke Nobel
