Quantum computing, quantum encryption and quantum teleportation: today's physics journals sound morelike Star Trek than ever. Based on the weird and counterintuitive features of quantum mechanics, these concepts have been brought to fruition in recent years by theorists and experimentalists alike. Indeed, these ideas are now leaving physics laboratories and being used by industry to make real products. Who knows what revolutions await in computation and communications from these budding breakthroughs?
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 was awarded jointly to John Clarke，Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit”. Their landmark research validated the laws of quantum mechanics at the macroscopic scale，breaking the traditional notion that quantum behavior is confined to the microscopic realm. This breakthrough directly catalyzed the advent of superconducting quantum computing and has been hailed as “opening a door to quantum technologies.”
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis for their foundational discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in electrical circuits. The work that was honored was conducted primarily in the mid-1980s in John Clarke’s laboratory at the University of California—Berkeley, as described in two articles in Physical Review Letters [M. H. Devoret, J. M. Martinis, J. Clarke, Phys. Rev. Lett. 55 , 1908–1911 (1985); J. M. Martinis, M. H. Devoret, J. Clarke, Phys. Rev. Lett. 55 , 1543–1546 (1985)]. This work effectively bridged the gap between the microscopic world of atoms and the macroscopic world of human-scale engineering.