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STOCKHOLM — Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for research on the strange behavior of subatomic particles called quantum tunneling that enables the ultra-sensitive measurements achieved by MRI machines and lays the groundwork for better cellphones and faster computers.
The work by John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis, who work at American universities, took the seeming contradictions of the subatomic world — where light can be both a wave and a particle and parts of atoms can tunnel through seemingly impenetrable barriers — and applied them in the more traditional physics of digital devices. The results of their findings are just starting to appear in advanced technology and could pave the way for the development of supercharged computing.
The prize-winning research in the mid-1980s took the subatomic “weirdness of quantum mechanics” and found how those tiny interactions can have real-world applications, said Jonathan Bagger, CEO of the American Physical Society. The experiments were a crucial building block in the fast-developing world of quantum mechanics.
Speaking from his cellphone, Clarke, who spearheaded the research team, said: “One of the underlying reasons that cellphones work is because of all this work.”
When quantum mechanics first came to light in 1926, it was explained by the example of a cat in a box that was both alive and dead at the same time. What the three Nobel winners did was show that it’s not just a thought experiment, and science can put the idea to work, said Physics Today editor-in-chief Richard Fitzgerald, who worked in a competing research group in the 1990s.
“They didn’t take it that far, but they showed that it can be done,” Fitzgerald said.
The winning physicists took “the scale of something that we can’t see, we can’t touch, we can’t feel” and brought it “up to the scale of something recognizable” and made it “something you can build upon,” Fitzgerald added.
Clarke, 83, conducted his research at the University of California, Berkeley. Martinis, 67, worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Devoret, 72, is at Yale and also at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Martinis’ wife, Jean, told Associated Press reporters who called at his home hours after the announcement that he was still asleep and did not yet know. In the past, she said, they stayed up on the night of the physics award, but at some point they decided that sleep was more important.
When his wife woke him, the new Nobel laureate said she told him “AP wanted to interview me. And I kind of knew that the Nobel Prize announcements was this week. So I put two and two together. I opened my computer and looked under the Nobel Prize 2025 and saw my picture along with Michel Devoret and John Clarke. So I was kind of in shock.”
Martinis — who was a senior Google scientist working toward quantum computing before co-founding his own company, Qolab — said the big future goal is quantum computing, which would be a giant leap in speed and sophistication by relying on the power of the contradictory states in that subatomic world.
That is still eight to 10 years away. But he said the team’s experiments showed “a computer could be much, much more powerful.”
Devoret is now chief scientist for Google’s quantum computing efforts.