For bringing quantum effects to a scale once thought impossible, three physicists will take home the 2025 Nobel Prize in physics.
In the 1980s, John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis turned up weird effects in special types of electric circuits. The effects involved billions of electrons. And they took place on a device big enough to hold in one’s hand.
Their discoveries challenged what scientists had believed. Previously, they had thought that quantum effects mainly showed up in tiny objects such as single atoms.
Quantum theory describes the behavior of particles or energy on the smallest scale. It predicts that particles can do some unexpected tricks. One of those tricks is called quantum tunneling. That’s when a particle slips through a barrier that’s seemingly impassible.
Imagine rolling a ball partway up a hill, but not enough to reach the top. Normally, it would roll back down. But in the quantum world, it’s as if the ball somehow appeared on the other side of the hill.
Since the discovery of this behavior in a circuit, tech companies and researchers have used similar circuits as the quantum bits (or qubits) that make up quantum computers.
Quantum computers’ power rests in the rules of quantum mechanics. On small scales, stuff acts much differently than in larger, everyday objects. But those weird behaviors give quantum computers the potential to perform special feats. Those devices could help find new medicines or useful materials. Or they could break the internet. They could even hack the standard type of encryption used to keep people from spying on your communication.
“The basis of quantum computing relies to quite an extent on our discovery,” said Clarke on Oct. 7. He spoke during an announcement of his win by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Clarke works at the University of California, Berkeley. Martinis works at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Devoret works there, too, and at Yale University. All three physicists will split 11 million Swedish kronor (more than $1.1 million) in prize money.
A win 40 years in the making
The trio studied a special type of electric circuit. It uses a material called a superconductor. In a superconductor, electricity can flow without any resistance. But only if it’s chilled to very cold temperatures.
The researchers took a superconductor and layered it with an insulator. That’s a material that doesn’t conduct electricity. It was like a sandwich with superconductor as the bread and insulator as the filling. This makes what is called a Josephson junction. (The junction, here, is the boundary between the superconductor and the insulator.)
In 1985, the trio reported finding for the first time that a circuit could switch between states in which there is — and isn’t — a voltage crossing the junction. That’s thanks to quantum tunneling.
The three scientists also showed that this circuit absorbed energy in discrete chunks. That’s known as quantization.
“It’s the foundation for why superconducting qubits work,” says Andreas Wallraff. A physicist, he works in this field at ETH Zurich. It’s in Switzerland. And the researchers didn’t stop at those early findings. “The thing that was special,” he says, is they also “continued to push the field forward throughout the years in different ways.”
Take Martinis. He was a central figure in the quest to demonstrate that a quantum computer could perform a calculation that would be out of reach for a traditional computer. At the time, he was the leader of Google’s quantum computing work. His team claimed, controversially, to have hit that benchmark in 2019. Competing for proof of that milestone has continued ever since.
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