Nobel Physics Prize 2025 Honors Quantum Effects Seen in Electric Circuits

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit. The announcement, made in early October 2025, recognizes experiments that helped move quantum physics out of the realm of individual atoms and particles and into hardware that engineers can build and measure.

What the laureates demonstrated

Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of very small objects, such as electrons and atoms, where energy comes in discrete amounts and particles can pass through barriers they classically could not cross. For decades, physicists debated whether these effects could appear in systems containing millions or billions of particles. The three laureates set out to test that question using superconducting circuits.

In experiments conducted in the mid-1980s at the University of California, Berkeley, Clarke, Devoret and Martinis worked with circuits built around Josephson junctions, which are thin barriers between superconducting materials. They showed that the collective state of the circuit, which involves billions of paired electrons moving together, could tunnel through an energy barrier and occupy quantized energy levels. The result showed that quantum behavior was not confined to the microscopic scale.

Why the work matters for computing

The findings became a foundation for superconducting qubits, the building blocks of many quantum computers being developed today. A qubit must maintain quantum states long enough to perform calculations, and it must be controllable with electronic signals. The 1980s experiments demonstrated that engineered circuits could exhibit the quantum properties needed for that control.

Devoret is affiliated with Yale University and Google Quantum AI, while Martinis has worked on superconducting quantum hardware in both academic and industry settings. Their research helped establish the field of circuit quantum electrodynamics and informed the design of processors built by several technology companies and research groups worldwide.

The prize and its context

The Nobel Prize carries a monetary award of 11 million Swedish kronor, which the laureates will share equally. The physics award was presented alongside the 2025 prizes in chemistry, medicine and other fields during the same week of announcements. The Academy noted that the work bridges fundamental physics and practical technology, a combination that has increasingly defined recognition in the field.

Quantum computing remains an active area of research with significant technical hurdles, including error correction, qubit stability and scaling. Researchers continue to refine superconducting approaches while also pursuing trapped-ion, photonic and other platforms. The 2025 prize highlights the theoretical and experimental groundwork underlying the superconducting branch of that effort.

Looking ahead

The award places renewed attention on the question of how far quantum effects can extend into engineered systems. Future work is likely to focus on building larger, more reliable quantum processors and on testing quantum behavior in increasingly complex devices. For the public, the prize serves as a reminder that discoveries made decades ago in basic physics can later shape the technologies that define the next era of computing.