Nobel Goes to Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis for Macroscopic Tunneling Superconducting Circuits

Laura Fattaruso

Flora Graham

Johanna L. Miller

Andrew N. Cleland, S. M. Girvin

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.

Alvaro Mariño

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis for their discoveries of macroscopic quantum tunneling and the quantization of energy in electrical circuits.

Michael Schirber