Overview

• The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences named John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis as laureates for “the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”
• The honored work used a superconducting circuit with a Josephson junction on a chip about one centimeter across to observe tunnelling and discrete energy levels in a hand‑sized system.
• The Nobel committee said the findings opened paths to next‑generation quantum technologies, including quantum computers, quantum cryptography and advanced quantum sensors.
• Clarke is a British physicist at the University of California, Berkeley; Devoret is a French physicist affiliated with Yale University and the University of California; Martinis is an American physicist at UC Santa Barbara.
• Clarke said he was “completely stunned” by the call; the prize includes 11 million Swedish kronor and will be presented at the December 10 ceremony in Stockholm.