Overview

• The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences named the trio winners on October 7 for discovering macroscopic quantum tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.
• The work used superconducting Josephson‑junction circuits that showed discrete energy levels and escape from a zero‑voltage state via quantum tunnelling.
• The key experiments were conducted in 1984–1985 on a chip roughly one centimeter across containing billions of Cooper pairs.
• The committee said the findings opened paths to next‑generation tools such as superconducting qubits, quantum cryptography and ultra‑sensitive sensors.
• Clarke (UC Berkeley), Devoret (Yale/University of California) and Martinis (UC Santa Barbara) will share 11 million SEK, with the prize to be presented on December 10; Clarke said he was "completely stunned."