USA – The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics was on Tuesday awarded to Michel H. Devoret, John M. Martinis and John Clarke, for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit.
Working in the 1980s at the University of California Berkley, the trio carried out experiments using an electrical circuit that demonstrated both quantum tunneling and quantized energy levels at a larger level, according to the announcement made at Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Quantum mechanics enables a particle to pass straight through a barrier, a phenomenon known as tunneling. Normally, when large numbers of particles are involved, such quantum effects fade away.
But the laureates’ experiments showed that “bizarre properties of the quantum world can be made concrete in a system big enough to be held in the hand.”
In 2024, the Nobel in Physics was awarded to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
Since 1901, the Nobel in Physics has been awarded 119 times to 230 laureates.
The late John Bardeen, a condensed matter physicist, is the only laureate to have won the prize twice, first in 1956 and then in 1972.
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