MilestoneHardwareConfirmed
Clarke, Devoret and Martinis win the Nobel Prize for quantum effects in circuits
Oct 7, 2025
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for 1984–85 experiments showing that an electric circuit big enough to be held in the hand can tunnel through a barrier and take only fixed energy levels, effects that usually vanish when many particles are involved.
Why it matters
Their superconducting circuits are the ancestors of the qubits in Google's and IBM's quantum computers; Martinis later led the Google team behind its 2019 quantum supremacy experiment.
John Clarke · Michel H. Devoret · John M. Martinis · Nobel Prize · UC Berkeley · Yale · UCSB
Sources (3)
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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (nobelprize.org)
Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2025
“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 quantisation in an electric circuit"”
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Physics World
John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis win the 2025 Nobel Prize for Physics
“The noise-control techniques developed by the trio to observe MQT and the fact that a Josephson junction can function as a macroscopic multilevel quantum system have led to the development of superconducting quantum bits (qubits) that form the basis of some nascent quantum computers.”
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The Quantum Insider
Clarke, Devoret And Martinis Win 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics For Revealing Quantum Effects in Macroscopic Circuits
“Martinis led Google’s quantum computing development team, leading to the pivotal paper on Nature declaring quantum supremacy.”
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