3 UC professors win 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for quantum discovery

"Three University of California professors have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating quantum physics to the tangible world by bringing what was confined to the subatomic realm into circuits big enough to be held in one's hand. On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that John Clarke of UC Berkeley, John Martinis of UC Santa Barbara and Michel Devoret of UC Santa Barbara and Yale University will share the award for "the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.""

"In the mid-1980s, Clarke, Devoret and Martinis built an electronic circuit large enough to be held, composed of superconductors separated by a thin nonconductive layer, a device called a Josephson junction. By refining and measuring its properties, they showed the circuit could transition out of a stable "zero-voltage" state by quantum tunneling, and that it absorbed or released 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," Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a news release. "It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology.""

Three University of California professors—John Clarke, John Martinis and Michel Devoret—received the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit. They built a Josephson junction in the mid-1980s, a superconducting circuit separated by a thin insulating layer and large enough to be held. Precise measurements showed the circuit could leave a stable zero-voltage state via quantum tunneling and absorbed or emitted discrete energy packets, proving quantisation at a macroscopic scale. The demonstration extends quantum rules from atoms to engineered circuits and supports emerging quantum technologies.

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