Trio of physicists win Nobel Prize for revealing ‘bizarre properties’ of the quantum world

By Christian Edwards, Katie Hunt, CNN

(CNN) — The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists – a Briton, a Frenchman and an American – for their ground-breaking discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics.

John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis will share the prize for their discovery of a phenomenon called quantum mechanical tunneling in an electrical circuit, an advance that laid the foundation for quantum computing and other related technology.

The Nobel Committee praised the laureates for demonstrating that the “bizarre properties of the quantum world can be made concrete in a system big enough to be held in the hand.”

Their work paved the way for real world applications of quantum mechanics, which governs the way the world works at the smallest, subatomic scales and distances, said Jonathan Bagger, a particle physicist and CEO of the American Physical Society.

“When quantum mechanics was discovered, it was thought to be applicable only to very esoteric situations,” Bagger told CNN. “What these guys showed is how actually, you can elevate quantum mechanics to apply to the observable, to the larger world, to the human scale world.”

Clarke, taking questions at a news conference, said he was “completely stunned” to learn he had won the award.

“We had not realized in any way that this might be the basis of a Nobel Prize,” Clarke said of their research in the 1980s at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is still based today.

Clarke said their research had led to technological advances, such as the creation of the cell phone.

Quantum pioneers

Quantum mechanics, which describes how matter and energy behaves at or below the scale of an atom, allows a particle to pass straight through a barrier, in a process called “tunneling.”

But when a larger number of particles are involved, these quantum mechanical effects usually become insignificant. What is true at the microscopic level was not thought to be true at the macroscopic level. For instance, while a single atom could pass through a barrier, a tennis ball – made up of a huge amount of particles – cannot.

However, the trio of researchers conducted experiments to show that quantum tunneling can also be observed on a macroscopic, visible scale in a system big enough to see and touch.

In 1984 and 1985, the trio developed a superconducting electrical system that could pass from one physical state to another, as if a tennis ball could move straight through a barrier and not bounce back.

“This year’s Nobel Prize recognizes the pioneers who first showed us that even an electrical circuit can behave as a genuine quantum system,” said Malcolm Connolly, an assistant professor in the department of physics at Imperial College London.

“Their discoveries of tunneling and energy quantization laid the foundation for today’s superconducting qubits, one of the leading platforms in the global race to build practical quantum computers.”

The hidden and chaotic world of quantum mechanics was first formally described by German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1925. One-hundred years later the United Nations declared 2025 the international year of quantum science and technology to celebrate the centenary of the breakthrough, although Ulf Danielsson, a professor of particle physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said that it wasn’t a conscious decision to mark that anniversary with the 2025 prize.

“They have realized tunneling, not in a microscopic way, where an electron is just moving through some barrier inside of a nucleon. Here it’s something that appears on scales which we can understand. So it’s like an electric switch that suddenly goes from one end to one state to another,” Danielsson told CNN.

Anthony Leggett, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2003, compared the laureates’ work on how quantum mechanics functions on a larger scale to the famous thought experiment of Erwin Schrödinger, another physics laureate, according to information shared by the Nobel Committee.

To show the paradoxical nature of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger imagined a cat in a sealed box with a device that releases poison when a radioactive source decays. Because there is no way to observe whether the cat is dead or alive, Schrödinger posited that the cat was both dead and alive simultaneously – just as, in quantum mechanics, a system can exist in multiple states at once until measured.

Schrödinger’s thought experiment aimed to show the absurdity of this situation, because quantum mechanics doesn’t make sense on the scale of everyday objects, such as a cat.

Leggett argued, however, that the experiments conducted by Clarke, Devoret and Martinis showed that there are phenomena on larger scales that behave just as quantum mechanics predicts.

“There is no advanced technology used today that does not rely on quantum mechanics, including mobile phones, cameras… and fiber optic cables,” said the Nobel committee.

Last year, the prize was awarded to Geoffrey Hinton – often called the “Godfather of AI” – and John Hopfield, for their fundamental discoveries in machine learning, which paved the way for how artificial intelligence is used today.

In 2023, the prize went to a trio of European scientists who used lasers to understand the rapid movement of electrons, which were previously thought impossible to follow.

The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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