Three physicists with ties to University of California, Berkeley have won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for their groundbreaking work showing that quantum effects can occur in systems large enough to hold in your hand.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday that it awarded the prize to John Clarke, a UC Berkeley professor, and John Martinis, a UC Santa Barbara professor who got his doctorate degree from UC Berkeley. Michel Devoret, a professor at Yale University and UCSB, also shares the award with Clarke and Martinis.
Clarke was born in 1942 in Cambridge, UK, while Devoret was born in 1953 in Paris. Martinis, an American, was born in 1958.
The Nobel Foundation said the three share the esteemed Nobel prize “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”
In 1984 and 1985, Clarke, Devoret and Martinis conducted a series of experiments at UC Berkeley. They built an electrical circuit using superconductors separated by a thin non-conductive layer, which is a setup known as a Josephson junction. Their work showed that quantum mechanics could govern not just tiny particles, but also macroscopic systems made up of many particles acting as one.
Their experiments demonstrated that the circuit could “escape” a zero-voltage state through quantum tunneling — a process where a particle passes straight through an energy barrier — and that it absorbed and emitted only specific amounts of energy, proving it was quantised.
“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 in a statement.
The discoveries have opened new paths for quantum technology, from quantum cryptography and computers to advanced sensors, according to The Nobel Foundation.
The trio will share an 11 million Swedish kronor prize, or over $1 million, according to the foundation.
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