Overview

• The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences named Michel H. Devoret, John Clarke and John M. Martinis as laureates in Stockholm on 7 October.
• The citation honors the discovery of macroscopic quantum tunneling and discrete energy levels in an electrical circuit using superconducting Josephson junctions.
• Pioneering experiments in the mid‑1980s, including work at UC Berkeley, demonstrated quantum behavior in circuits sizable enough to handle and engineer.
• The committee said these results opened the way to qubits, quantum chips and applications such as quantum computers, cryptography and sensors.
• Devoret is a French physicist at Yale and a scientific director at Google Quantum AI, Clarke is at UC Berkeley, and Martinis is at UC Santa Barbara.