US-based scientists John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for “Experiments that revealed quantum physics in action”, the awarding body said on Tuesday.
“This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has provided opportunities for developing the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers and quantum sensors,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.
The Nobel winners conducted experiments in the mid-1980s with an electronic circuit built from superconductors and showed that quantum mechanical properties could be created in concrete on a much larger, macroscopic scale.
Discoveries power everyday technologies
Quantum technology is already ubiquitous, with transistors in computer microchips an everyday example.
“My feelings are that I am completely stunned. Of course it had never occurred to me in any way that this might be the basis of a Nobel Prize,” Clarke told the Nobel press conference by phone.
“I’m talking on my cell phone and I suspect you are too, and one of the underlying reasons the cell phone works is because of all this work.”
Clarke, who is British, is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.
Born in France, Devoret is a professor at Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, also in the United States, where Martinis is also a professor.
Martinis, an American, led Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab until he resigned in 2020.
“It’s great to be able to celebrate how age-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises. It’s also hugely useful, because quantum mechanics is the basis of all digital technology,” said Olle Eriksson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
Physics Second Nobel Prize awarded this week
The Nobel Physics Prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and includes a prize sum totaling 11 million Swedish kronor ($1.2 million) which is shared among the winners if there are several, as is often the case.
The Nobel Prizes were established by the will of Alfred Nobel, who made a fortune from his invention of dynamite. Since 1901, with occasional interruptions, the prizes have annually recognized achievements in science, literature and peace. Economics was a later addition.
Physics was the first category mentioned in Nobel’s will, which likely reflects the field’s prominence during his time. Today, the Nobel Prize in Physics remains widely regarded as the most prestigious prize in the discipline.
Previous winners of the Nobel Physics Prize include some of the most influential figures in the history of science, such as Albert Einstein, Pierre and Marie Curie, Max Planck and Niels Bohr, himself a pioneer of quantum theory.
Last year’s prize was won by American scientist John Hopfield and British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton for breakthroughs in machine learning that have fueled the artificial intelligence boom, a development about which both have also raised concerns.
In keeping with tradition, physics is the second Nobel to be awarded this week, after two American and one Japanese scientists won the medicine prize for breakthroughs in understanding the immune system. The chemistry prize is next, on Wednesday.
The prizes for science, literature and economics will be presented to the laureates by the Swedish king at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, followed by a lavish banquet at City Hall.
The Peace Prize, to be announced on Friday, will be awarded in a separate ceremony in Oslo.
