Nobel prize for physics goes to trio behind quantum computing chips

2025 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded John ClarkIN Michelle Dur And John Martinis For their work to show how quantum particles can mysteriously tunnel through matter, a process that helped create superconducting quantum technology that forms the basis of modern quantum computers.

“I'm completely stunned,” Clark told the Nobel committee upon hearing he had won the prize. “It never occurred to me that this could be the basis of the Nobel Prize.”

Quantum particles have many strange behaviors, such as their probabilistic nature and the fact that they can only have certain energy levels rather than a continuum. This causes them to sometimes behave unexpectedly, e.g. tunneling through clearly a solid barrier. Such oddities were discovered by physicists such as Erwin Schrödinger in the early decades of quantum mechanics.

While the consequences of this behavior were clearly profound, such as at the heart of the theory of nuclear decay, scientists could only observe them in individual particles and simple systems. It was unclear whether more complex systems, such as electronic circuits previously described only by classical physics, were also subject to these rules. For example, the effects of quantum tunneling seemed to disappear when viewing large-scale systems.

In 1985, Clark, Martinis and DeVorette, then based at the University of California, Berkeley, decided to change that. They measured the properties of charged particles moving through superconducting circuits called Josephson JunctionsThe device that won British physicist Brian Josephson the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics. These connections use wires that have zero electrical resistance and are separated by insulating material.

The researchers showed that particles moving through these junctions acted as one particle and took on different energy levels, a distinctly quantum effect, and also detected voltages that would not have been possible without jumping over an insulation boundary, a clear example of quantum tunneling.

This discovery, and its help in understanding how to manipulate superconducting quantum systems like these, revolutionized the field of quantum science, allowing other scientists to test precise quantum physics on silicon chips.

Superconducting quantum circuits also formed the basis for the basic building blocks of quantum computers—the quantum bit, or qubit. The most powerful quantum computers today, built by companies like Google and IBM, use machines made up of hundreds of superconducting qubits, which led to the results of Clarke, Martinis and Devoret. “Our discovery is, in a sense, the basis of quantum computing,” Clark said.

Martinis and Devoret both worked at Google Quantum AI, which created the first superconducting quantum computer quantum advantage For a classic car, in 2019. But Clark told the Nobel committee that it was not clear at the time how influential their 1985 study would be. “It never occurred to us that this discovery would have such a significant impact.”