Trio win Nobel prize for revealing quantum physics in action

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis. The trio showed that quantum mechanics doesn’t just rule the microscopic world — it can also influence everyday objects under certain conditions. Using superconducting circuits, they demonstrated macroscopic quantum tunnelling and energy quantisation, revealing that even electrical circuits can behave in truly quantum ways.

Why it matters: Before their experiments, quantum tunneling and energy quantisation had been observed mostly in atoms and subatomic particles. Their experiments bridged the boundary between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds, laying the foundation for technologies that rely on manipulating quantum states at human scales. These include quantum sensors capable of detecting minute magnetic fields and new approaches to secure communication.

A bit of history: The Nobel Prizes were established by Alfred Nobel in 1901, funded by his fortune from inventing dynamite. Physics was the first category he mentioned, reflecting its prominence at the time. The Nobel physics prize includes a prize sum totaling 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.7 million AUD) that is shared among the winners if there are several, as is often the case. Past winners include giants like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, and Max Planck — pioneers of quantum theory.

Quantum tunnelling 101: Quantum tunnelling lets particles pass through barriers they classically shouldn’t be able to. Thanks to the wave-like nature of matter, a particle’s probability “leaks” into forbidden regions — and sometimes, it pops through. First spotted in radioactive decay, tunnelling is now at the heart of superconducting circuits. Those same circuits — Josephson junctions — revealed macroscopic quantum tunnelling in the 1980s, and today they form the backbone of quantum computers used by Google, IBM, and others.