UC Scientists Win Nobel Prize for Showing ‘Bizarre’ Workings of Quantum World

Three University of California scientists were awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in physics for a series of experiments they conducted in the 1980s that laid the groundwork for modern quantum computing.

John Clarke of UC Berkeley and Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis of UC Santa Barbara were honored Tuesday for their work demonstrating some of the “bizarre” — and traditionally microscopic — properties of the quantum world at the macroscopic level for the first time.

“It had never occurred to me in any way that this might be the basis of a Nobel Prize,” Clarke, who served as the principal of the group, said while accepting the prize on the scientists’ behalf. “To put it mildly, it was the surprise of my life.”

Clarke, who has been a part of Berkeley’s physics faculty since 1969, led multiple efforts to try to demonstrate quantum tunneling — the phenomenon that some particles can move through barriers classical physics would assume can’t be breached — at a macro level in the 1980s.

Scientists had previously proved that while a ball thrown against a wall, for example, always bounces back, a single particle thrown against an equivalent barrier in its microscopic world sometimes passes through.

In 1984 and 1985, Clarke, along with Martinis, who was a graduate student at the time, and Devoret, then a postdoctoral fellow, developed a model that showed the phenomenon in a way visible to the naked eye.

They designed an electrical circuit featuring two semiconductors that was able to conduct an electrical current without electrical resistance.

“The system [they created] shows its quantum character by using tunnelling to escape the zero-voltage state, generating an electrical voltage,” the Nobel committee wrote about the work.

The committee explained that quantum mechanics can be challenging to study, since it describes properties that are significant on the scale of single particles, which are sometimes smaller than can be seen using an optical microscope.

The scientists’ demonstration of the strange quantum tunneling process at a more visible scale “laid the foundation for exploring macroscopic quantum physics in superconducting circuits,” the Nobel committee wrote in its announcement of the award on Tuesday.

“A major question in physics is the maximum size of a system that can demonstrate quantum mechanical effects,” the announcement said. “This year’s Nobel Prize laureates conducted experiments with an electrical circuit in which they demonstrated both quantum mechanical tunnelling and quantised energy levels in a system big enough to be held in the hand.”

According to the committee, the scientists’ experiments provided opportunities for further developments in quantum technology, including in quantum cryptography, which is a method of data encryption and secure communication, and quantum computers and sensors, which can perform calculations that are impossible on traditional computers and have been used to make advances in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and new drug design.

Olle Eriksson, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, called their work “enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology.”