Physics 2025 · Announced Oct 7
John Clarke
The lab head behind the 1980s quantum circuit experiments.
Born 1942 · United Kingdom / United States · University of California, Berkeley
40 yrs
The wait, from their Berkeley experiments (1985) to the prize
1942
Year born
3
People sharing this prize
Oct 7
Announced in 2025
Their part in the prize
Quantum rules usually only show up in tiny things like atoms. In the 1980s these three built a circuit big enough to see. It still followed quantum rules. It could even pass through a wall it should not get through.
Why it matters
That kind of circuit is the base of many of today's quantum computers.
The road to the prize
- 1985Clarke, Devoret and Martinis show quantum tunnelling in a circuit at Berkeley.
- 2019A team led by Martinis at Google runs a quantum chip built on the same idea.
- 2025Nobel Prize in Physics.
Shared with
The official reason for all 3: "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit"