Overview

• The Royal Swedish Academy honored the trio for demonstrating macroscopic quantum tunneling and quantized energy levels in an electrical circuit.
• Their experiments used superconducting circuits with Josephson junctions to reveal quantum behavior at a scale large enough to manipulate.
• The committee said the work opened the way to next‑generation quantum technologies, including computing, cryptography and sensors, with 11 million Swedish kronor to be shared.
• Clarke (UK, UC Berkeley), Devoret (France, Yale; work linked to CEA Saclay and UCSB, with roles reported at Google Quantum AI) and Martinis (US, UC Santa Barbara; former Google quantum lead) carried out the landmark studies in the 1980s.
• Reporting notes major hurdles for scalable quantum computers such as decoherence, error correction and extreme cooling requirements, while John Clarke criticized U.S. science policy under President Trump as “disastrous.”