\n <\/p>\n
John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis revealed quantum physics on a macroscopic scale. The work was a milestone for the development of superconducting quantum circuits.<\/span>Credit: UC Berkeley; Yale Engineering; Rocco Ceselin for Nature<\/span><\/p>\n Three physicists have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating quantum physics on the macroscopic scale. <\/p>\n The research, including into the bizarre phenomena of quantum tunnelling and quantum superposition, has helped to underpin some of today\u2019s most advanced quantum computers. <\/p>\n John Clarke at the University of California, Berkeley, Michel Devoret at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and John Martinis, also of USCB will share the prize of 11-million Swedish kronor (US$1.2 million), announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 7 October. <\/p>\n \u201cI am completely stunned; it had never occurred to me in any way that this might be the basis for a Nobel prize,\u201d said Clarke, speaking to journalists gathered for the announcement. \u201cI think that our discovery in some ways is the basis of quantum computing,\u201d he said, adding that although he led the trio\u2019s work in the 1980s, the contributions of the other two were \u201coverwhelming\u201d. <\/p>\n Martinis told Nature that his wife had gotten the news in the middle of the night \u2014 in California time \u2014 but decided not to wake him up quite yet. “I woke up a little bit before 6. Then I opened my computer and saw John and Michel\u2019s and my pictures.” <\/p>\n \u201cIt 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,\u201d said Olle Eriksson, a physicist at Uppsala University in Sweden and chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics. <\/p>\n Quantum tunnelling of electrons brings ultrafast optical microscopy to the atomic scale<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The foundations of quantum mechanics were laid down 100 years ago. But many of its strange implications have taken decades to unravel. <\/p>\n One is the phenomenon of quantum tunnelling \u2014 the ability of particles to pass straight through a barrier that shouldn\u2019t be possible according to classical physics, given its energy. Tunnelling explains radioactive decay, in which, despite being confined inside an atom, an alpha particle still has a small probability of escaping the nucleus. Another is quantum superposition, in which an object can exist simultaneously in two states. <\/p>\n Both tunnelling and superposition were known at the atomic scale but hadn’t been observed in macroscopic systems. In the late 1970s, Anthony Leggett, who won the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theoretical work on superconductors, asked whether the phenomena would be observable at the macroscopic scale using superconducting circuits \u2014 loops of wire which, when chilled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, can conduct electricity without resistance1.<\/p>\n “We took the question very seriously \u2014 would quantum mechanics be obeyed by these large systems? And we thought very carefully how we would prove that,” Martinis recalls. In the 1980s, Clarke, Devoret and Martinis, working at Berkeley, were among those exploring quantum effects in superconducting loops2. The trio set up an experiment in which two superconductors were separated by a thin barrier, known as a Josephson junction3. In this state, a supercurrent can flow with zero resistance, like a river that runs without friction \u2014 but also with zero voltage, so without a downhill gradient that gives the current a push. In classical physics, the system would stay stuck like this, unless given enough energy to escape. <\/p>\n By carefully monitoring the system, and slowly increasing the current, Clarke, Devoret and Martinis showed that the entire tiny circuit could break out into a higher energy state \u2014 by quantum tunnelling, which they observed by measuring a voltage spike. Yasunobu Nakamura, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, says that it still came as a surprise to many that quantum mechanics could manifest itself at such large scales. <\/p>\n \u201cThey are really pioneers of this field,\u201d says Nakamura, who in the late 1990s became the first physicist to demonstrate a superconducting qubit bit or \u2018qubit\u2019 using a similar principle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis revealed quantum physics on a macroscopic scale. The work was a milestone for the development of superconducting quantum circuits.Credit: UC Berkeley; Yale Engineering; Rocco Ceselin for Nature Three physicists have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating quantum physics on the macroscopic scale. The research,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26639,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[12647,15965,13708,5479,15966,1259],"class_list":{"0":"post-26638","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-experiments","9":"tag-groundbreaking","10":"tag-nobel","11":"tag-physics","12":"tag-quantumtunnelling","13":"tag-win"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Macroscopic quantum mechanics <\/h2>\n