Wall Street Journal – October, 10, 2025 – By Aylin Woodward
A trio of professors in the U.S. won the Nobel Prize in physics for work that enabled the creation of macroscopic quantum systems, a foundation of quantum computers and other technology.
John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis will share the prize.
“There is no advanced technology used today that does not rely on quantum mechanics and quantum physics,” said Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, at the announcement ceremony Tuesday.
The Nobel Prize-winning trio’s work allowed for other researchers to create quantum bits, or qubits, which are the basic units of information storage and communication in quantum computing. Without qubits, companies like Google and IBM wouldn’t be able to build some of today’s most powerful quantum computers.
“Their work is the fundamental research that was required to get us to the point where we started to realize that we could potentially build quantum computers,” according to Gregory Quiroz, a quantum information scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
While they remain a work in progress, quantum computers promise to be faster than traditional computers for optimization problems, such as finding more efficient options for supply chains or discovering new drugs.
“People think of quantum mechanics as something to do with atoms and things happening at very small distances. But this prize has shown actually that there can be applications of quantum mechanics at the scale of the livable world,” said Jonathan Bagger, chief executive of the American Physical Society.
The group’s research involved bringing the microscopic world into the visible one.
Macroscopic objects—those visible to the naked eye—are governed by classical mechanics: Their future is predictable with certainty if you know the initial conditions. But microscopic objects like electrons and atoms are governed by quantum mechanics, where predicted outcomes are based on probabilities and randomness, helping scientists understand the difference between the behavior of atoms and everyday objects.
In classical mechanics, a ball thrown at a wall will always bounce back. But in quantum mechanics, an electron thrown against a wall will sometimes go through, according to David Haviland, a professor of nanostructure physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. This process is known as tunneling.
Typically, when large numbers of particles become involved, quantum mechanical effects become insignificant, but the work of the three Nobel winners showed tunneling could happen on a larger scale than was thought possible.
In California in the mid-1980s, they conducted a series of experiments in which they demonstrated several quantum mechanical properties, including tunneling, held on a macroscopic scale in an electrical system big enough to hold in your hand.
“When these experiments were done, it was really a curiosity of science,” said Haviland, who is also a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “This phenomenon of macroscopic quantum physics is now underpinning a lot of technology development.”
Other examples of technology that rely on quantum mechanics include transistors, which are key to modern computers and cellphones, as well as magnetic resonance imaging and atomic clocks.
Clarke, a Briton, is associated with the University of California, Berkeley; Devoret, a Frenchman, is associated with Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the American Martinis is with the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Devoret and Martinis have both worked for Google, doing quantum-computing research.