By Niklas Pollard and Johan Ahlander
Stockholm scientists (Reuters) -us, John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis, won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for “experiments that revealed quantum physics in action”, racing the way for the development of the next generation of digital technologies.
“My feelings are that I am completely stunned. Of course, it had never occurred to me in any way that this is the basis of a Nobel Prize,” Clarke told the Nobel Press Conference on Tuesday.
“I am talking on my cell phone and I suspect that you too, and one of the underlying reasons why the cell phone works is due to all this work.”
‘New surprises’ in the field of centenic quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanical behaviors are well studied at the level of incredibly small atoms and subatomic particles, but they are often considered strange and not very intuitive compared to classical physics and their much greater scale.
Nobel winners carried out experiments in the mid -1980s with an electronic circuit built with superconductors and demonstrated that quantum mechanics could also influence everyday objects under certain conditions.
“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way in which centenary quantum mechanics offers new surprises. It is also enormously useful, since quantum mechanics is the basis of all digital technology,” said Olle Eriksson, president of the Nobel Committee of Physics.
Quantum technology is already ubiquitous, with transistors in computer microchips a daily example.
“This year’s Nobel Nobel Prize has provided opportunities to develop the next generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers and quantum sensors,” said the Royal Academy of Sciences, granted by the prize, in a statement, in a statement.
Two winning trio have links to Google
Clarke, born in British, is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.
Devoret, born in France, is a professor at Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, also in the United States, where Martinis is also a professor.
Martinis, an American, headed the Google artificial intelligence quantum laboratory until 2020. In Google, Martinis was part of the research team that in 2019 said they had achieved a “quantum supremacy”, in which a computer that took advantage of the properties of subatomic particles did a much better job to solve a problem than the most powerful supercomputer in the world.
Devoret, in addition to his profession, is also the main scientist of Google Quantum AI.
Second Nobel Prize Physics awarded this week
The Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded by the Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden and includes a sum of the prize that totalizes 11 million Swedish crowns ($ 1.2 million) that is shared among the winners if there are several, as is the case.
The Nobel awards were established through the will of Alfred Nobel, who accumulated a fortune of his invention of dynamite. Since 1901, with occasional interruptions, the awards have annually recognized achievements in science, literature and peace. The economy was a subsequent addition.
Physics was the first category mentioned in Nobel’s will, which probably reflects the prominence of the field during its time. Today, the Nobel Prize in Physics is still widely considered the most prestigious prize in the discipline.
The previous winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics include some of the most influential figures in the history of science, such as Albert Einstein, Pierre and Marie Curie, Max Planck and Niels Bohr, the pioneer of quantum theory.
The American scientist of last year was won by the American scientist John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton of British-Canadian for the advances in automatic learning that stimulated the rise of artificial intelligence, a development on which both have also expressed concern.
According to tradition, Physics is the second Nobel Prize to be awarded this week, after two American and Japanese scientists won the Medicine Prize for Progress to understand the immune system. The Chemistry Award expires next Wednesday.
The awards of science, literature and economy are presented to those laureate by the Swedish king at a ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, followed by a luxurious banquet in the town hall.
The La Paz Prize, which will be announced on Friday, is awarded in a separate ceremony in Oslo.
($ 1 = 9,3898 Swedish crowns)
(Niklas Pollard reports, Simon Johnson and Johan Ahlander in Stockholm; Additional reports by Marie Mannes, Greta Rosen Fondahn and Supantha Mukherjee in Stockholm, and Terje Solsvik in Oslo; Alex Richardson edition)
(Tagstotranslate) John Martinis (T) John Clarke (T) Nobel Prize in Physics (T) Quantum Physics (T) Nobel Prize (T) Michel Devoret