The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to John Clarke of the United Kingdom, Michel Devoret of France, and John Martinis of the United States for their pioneering work in quantum mechanical tunnelling, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Tuesday.
The trio received the prize for the “discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit,” according to the award citation.
The Academy said their groundbreaking experiments in the mid-1980s, using superconducting electronic circuits, demonstrated that quantum mechanical effects could be observed on a macroscopic scale—a finding that has paved the way for the development of next-generation quantum technologies, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum sensors.
On its official account on X (formerly Twitter), the Nobel Committee explained that the laureates’ work “took quantum mechanical effects from a microscopic scale to a macroscopic one.”
Their discovery is seen as a cornerstone in the advancement of quantum information science, bridging the gap between fundamental physics and real-world applications.
