The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Clark, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis for their work on quantum mechanics, which paves the way for a new generation of very powerful computers.
“There is no advanced technology today that does not rely on quantum mechanics, including mobile phones, cameras… and fiber optic cables,” the Nobel committee said.
This was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
“This has been the surprise of my life, to say the least,” said Professor John Clark, who was born in Cambridge, UK, and now works at the University of California, Berkeley.
Michel H. Devore was born in Paris, France, and is a professor at Yale University, and John M. Martinis is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The three winners will share a prize fund of SEK 11 million (£872,000).
The Nobel Committee recognized the groundbreaking work done by these three men in a series of experiments on electrical circuits in the 1980s.
According to the committee, “the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electrical circuit.”
Even for a field that is often considered dense, this discovery sounds stunning.
But its consequences were deep and far-reaching. The electronic devices most of us use rely on it, and its discoveries are used to create extremely powerful computers.
“This is what leads to the development of a quantum computer. There are a lot of people working on quantum computing, our discovery is very much at the heart of that,” Professor Clarke said by telephone at a press conference moments after he was told he had won.
He was puzzled that his work, completed forty years ago, was worthy of the most prestigious scientific prize.
“I'm completely stunned. We had no idea at the time that this could be the basis for a Nobel Prize,” he said.
Quantum mechanics is concerned with the behavior of tiny things in a tiny world. This refers to what particles such as the electron do in the subatomic world.
Professor Clarke and his team studied how these particles bend rules, such as breaking through energy barriers that conventional physics says are impossible – called 'tunneling'.
Using quantum “tunneling”, the electron manages to penetrate the energy barrier.
Their work demonstrated that tunneling can be replicated not only in the quantum world, but also in “real world” electrical circuits.
This knowledge was used by scientists to create modern quantum chips.
“This is truly wonderful news and well deserved,” said Professor Leslie Cohen, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the Department of Physics at Imperial College London.
“Their work laid the foundation for superconducting qubits, one of the core hardware technologies for quantum technologies.”
