Physics 2025 · Announced Oct 7
They made quantum weirdness happen in a chip you can hold.
Shared by three people
In plain words
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 official reason
"for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit"
40
years from their Berkeley experiments (1985) to the prize
The long road
- 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.