2025 Nobel Prize Resources

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Nobel committee honors work that bridges quantum mechanics and the tangible world.
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Physics Nobel Prize awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis

Physics Nobel Prize Hero 2025

Physics Nobel Prize awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis

Physics Nobel Prize Hero 2025

The physics prize was announced Tuesday, Oct. 7, at 5:45 a.m. ET. The prize was awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”

Quantum mechanics is typically relegated to the microscopic realm, with effects that are profound but almost never observable in the tangible world. Using a specialized circuit called a Josephson junction, the trio were the first to demonstrate that quantum effects, such as quantum tunneling and energy quantization, can operate on macroscopic scales. Today, Josephson junctions have applications in quantum computing, sensing, and cryptography. These remarkable technological developments would not be possible without the laureates’ seminal 1985 work.

In the classical world, a ball bounces back after coming across a wall. But in the quantum world, in a process called quantum tunneling, a small particle can simply appear on the other side of the barrier, as if it had dug a tunnel. A Josephson junction is a macroscopic device that takes advantage of this effect: Despite a small gap between two conductors, electrons can still tunnel through the gap and create a current.

The team also demonstrated that the Josephson junction exhibited quantized energy levels — meaning the energy of the system is limited to only certain allowed values — confirming the quantum nature of the system.

Chemistry Nobel Prize awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi

Nobel 2025 Chemistry Hero

Chemistry Nobel Prize awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi

Nobel 2025 Chemistry Hero

The chemistry prize was announced Wednesday, Oct. 8, at 5:45 a.m. ET. The prize was awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi “for the development of metal–organic frameworks.”

The laureates created and refined a new class of materials that have large empty spaces in their structure. The appeal of the materials, Physics Today’s Johanna Miller reported in 2017, “stems from their customizability: By choosing the right metal and organic units, one can independently tune the pores’ size, shape, topology, and surface chemistry.” In recent years, researchers have developed materials to extract water vapor and carbon dioxide from air, catalyze various chemical reactions, and serve other useful applications.

  • This recognition of profoundly important work is especially noteworthy during our celebration in 2025 of the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. It is meaningful to have a prize that recognizes the significance and pervasiveness of foundational quantum physics, and as we continue to celebrate IYQ, we will now double down on our celebrations owing to this wonderful recognition of truly transformative science.
    Michael Moloney headshot
    Chief Executive Officer AIP
  • This year’s Nobel Prize in physics celebrates a profound achievement, demonstrating that the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics extend to systems visible on a human scale. The discoveries of John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis revealed quantum tunneling and energy quantization in superconducting systems, a breakthrough that laid the foundation for today’s quantum technologies.
    Penelope Lewis Headshot
    Chief Publishing Officer, AIPP
2025 Nobel physics laureates
Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis share 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics
Their experiments with an electric circuit in which all the electrons together behaved like a single particle provided the first demonstration of quantum behavior at a macroscopic scale. Read more at Physics Today.
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The Nobel Prize
Each year Physics Today provides detailed coverage of the Nobel Prize in Physics and other physics-related Nobel awards. This collection includes our annual prize summaries along with historical perspectives and infographics.
About John Clarke
John Clarke was born in 1942 in Cambridge, U.K. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in physics from Cambridge University in 1964 and his doctorate in 1968. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the physics faculty there in 1969, where he has remained throughout his career.

Clarke’s research has focused on superconductivity and superconducting electronics, particularly the development and application of superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs). These ultrasensitive magnetic detectors became crucial tools for demonstrating that quantum mechanical effects — previously observed only at the atomic scale — could manifest in macroscopic electrical circuits. His work on SQUIDs revealed how quantum phenomena like energy quantization and tunneling could be harnessed in engineered devices, fundamentally bridging quantum theory and practical technology. His contributions span from the foundations of quantum devices to applications in quantum computing, medical diagnostics, and even the search for dark matter.

Clarke’s groundbreaking work has earned him numerous honors, including the Fritz London Prize (1987), the American Physical Society’s Joseph F. Keithley Award (1998), the National Academy of Sciences’ Comstock Prize for Physics (1999), the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society (2004), and the Micius Quantum Prize (2021). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (elected 1986) and the American Physical Society (elected 1985), and was elected a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2012.
About Michel H. Devoret
Michel H. Devoret was born in Paris, France, in 1953. He graduated from Ecole National Superieure des Telecommunications and learned his doctorate in physics from the University of Orsay in 1982, where he began to work on molecular quantum physics.

During a postdoctoral stay in Berkeley, California, in 1982-1984 in John Clarke’s laboratory, Devoret measured the mesoscopic quantum levels of a Josephson junction for the first time. On his return to France, together with Daniel Esteve and Cristian Urbina, he founded the quantronics group at the Orme des Merisiers laboratory (CEA-Saclay). The group’s main achievements include the measurement of the traversal time of tunneling, the invention of the electron pump, direct observation of the charge of Cooper pairs and the development of a superconducting quantum bit, the first measurement of the effect of atomic valence on the conductance of a single atom, and the first observation of the Ramsey fringes of a superconducting artificial atom (quantronium). Devoret became director of research at the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique (CEA) at Saclay. In 2007, he was appointed to the College de France, where he taught until 2012. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003) and the French Academy of Sciences (2008), Devoret received the Ampere Prize of the French Academy of Science (together with Daniel Esteve, 1991), the Descartes-Huygens Prize of the Royal Academy of Science of the Netherlands (1996) and the Europhysics-Agilent Prize of the European Physical Society (together with Daniel Esteve, Hans Mooij and Yasunobu Nakamura, 2004). He is also a recipient of the John Stewart Bell Prize, which he received jointly with Rob Schoelkopf in 2013. In 2014, he was awarded, together with John Martinis and Rob Schoelkopf, the Fritz London Memorial Prize.

Currently, Devoret is the F.W. Beinecke Professor of Applied Physics at the Yale Quantum Institute, where he started a research program on amplification at the quantum limit and pursues research on experimental solid-state physics with emphasis on quantum mechanical electronics, as well as a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a member of the American Physical Society.
About John M. Martinis
John Martinis was born in 1958. His father escaped Yugoslavia following the rise of communism and came to the United States, where he met Martinis’ mother. Martinis grew up in San Pedro, California, near Los Angeles, and first became familiar with physics helping his father work on projects in the garage. He studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where in his senior year he built a hadron calorimeter for his senior thesis and took a course on condensed matter physics with John Clarke, who was doing experiments on quantum effects in devices. Martinis remained at Berkeley to work with Clarke for his doctorate.

For his dissertation, Martinis’ interest had been piqued by a talk by Anthony Leggett on macroscopic quantum tunneling, speculating whether it can occur in macroscopic objects. This turned Martinis’ attention to studying tunneling in Josephson junctions, which he worked on with Clarke and Michel Devoret.

Martinis received his doctorate in 1987 and took a postdoctoral position at the Commisiariat Energie Atomic in Saclay, France, where he continued his work on the Josephson effect. He then joined the Electromagnetic Technology division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, and in 2004 he moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has specialized in quantum computing, demonstrating a variety of new devices and capabilities. In 2014, he joined the new quantum computing team at Google and was integral to the effort that resulted in Google’s “quantum supremacy” declaration in 2019. He returned to UCSB shortly thereafter. He is co-founder and currently chief technology officer of Qolab, which is focused on the development of superconducting qubits. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (elected 1997).

2025 Nobel Resources for Physics and Chemistry

Physics Today
Niels Bohr Library & Archives
AIP Member Societies
AIP Publishing Journals

Physics: John Clarke

Charlottesville revisited
John Clarke
AIP Conf. Proc. 44, 1–10 (1978)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.31340

SQUIDs and magnetotellurics with a remote reference
John Clarke; Thomas D. Gamble; Wolfgang M. Goubau
AIP Conf. Proc. 44, 87–94 (1978)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.31386

Thin‐film dc SQUID with low noise and drift
John Clarke; Wolfgang M. Goubau; Mark B. Ketchen
Appl. Phys. Lett. 27, 155–156 (1975)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.88391

Electronics with superconducting junctions
John Clarke
Physics Today 24 (8), 30–37 (1971)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3022881

The Josephson Effect and e/h
John Clarke
Am. J. Phys. 38, 1071–1095 (1970)
https://doi.org/10.1119/1.1976556

Physics: Michel H. Devoret

Frequency-tunable Kerr-free three-wave mixing with a gradiometric SNAIL
A. Miano; G. Liu; V. V. Sivak; N. E. Frattini; V. R. Joshi; W. Dai; L. Frunzio; M. H. Devoret
Appl. Phys. Lett. 120, 184002 (2022)
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0083350

Free-standing silicon shadow masks for transmon qubit fabrication
I. Tsioutsios; K. Serniak; S. Diamond; V. V. Sivak; Z. Wang; S. Shankar; L. Frunzio; R. J. Schoelkopf; M. H. Devoret
AIP Advances 10, 065120 (2020)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5138953

Demonstration of superconducting micromachined cavities
T. Brecht; M. Reagor; Y. Chu; W. Pfaff; C. Wan; L. Frunzio; M. H. Devoret; R. J. Schoelkopf
Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 192603 (2015)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4935541

Surface participation and dielectric loss in superconducting qubits
C. Wang; C. Axline; Y. Y. Gao; T. Brecht; Y. Chu; L. Frunzio; M. H. Devoret; R. J. Schoelkopf
Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 162601 (2015)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4934486

Very low noise photodetector based on the single electron transistor
A. N. Cleland; D. Esteve; C. Urbina; M. H. Devoret
Appl. Phys. Lett. 61, 2820–2822 (1992)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.108048

Physics: John M. Martinis

Traveling wave parametric amplifier with Josephson junctions using minimal resonator phase matching
T. C. White; J. Y. Mutus; I.-C. Hoi; R. Barends; B. Campbell; Yu Chen; Z. Chen; B. Chiaro; A. Dunsworth; E. Jeffrey; J. Kelly; A. Megrant; C. Neill; P. J. J. O’Malley; P. Roushan; D. Sank; A. Vainsencher; J. Wenner; S. Chaudhuri; J. Gao; John M. Martinis
Appl. Phys. Lett. 106, 242601 (2015)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4922348

Strong environmental coupling in a Josephson parametric amplifier
J. Y. Mutus; T. C. White; R. Barends; Yu Chen; Z. Chen; B. Chiaro; A. Dunsworth; E. Jeffrey; J. Kelly; A. Megrant; C. Neill; P. J. J. O’Malley; P. Roushan; D. Sank; A. Vainsencher; J. Wenner; K. M. Sundqvist; A. N. Cleland; John M. Martinis
Appl. Phys. Lett. 104, 263513 (2014)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4886408

Quantum state characterization of a fast tunable superconducting resonator
Z. L. Wang; Y. P. Zhong; L. J. He; H. Wang; John M. Martinis; A. N. Cleland; Q. W. Xie
Appl. Phys. Lett. 102, 163503 (2013)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4802893

Multiplexed dispersive readout of superconducting phase qubits
Yu Chen; D. Sank; P. O’Malley; T. White; R. Barends; B. Chiaro; J. Kelly; E. Lucero; M. Mariantoni; A. Megrant; C. Neill; A. Vainsencher; J. Wenner; Y. Yin; A. N. Cleland; John M. Martinis
Appl. Phys. Lett. 101, 182601 (2012)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4764940

Planar superconducting resonators with internal quality factors above one million
A. Megrant; C. Neill; R. Barends; B. Chiaro; Yu Chen; L. Feigl; J. Kelly; Erik Lucero; Matteo Mariantoni; P. J. J. O’Malley; D. Sank; A. Vainsencher; J. Wenner; T. C. White; Y. Yin; J. Zhao; C. J. Palmstrøm; John M. Martinis; A. N. Cleland
Appl. Phys. Lett. 100, 113510 (2012)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3693409

Physics: Topical Articles

Quantum-Mechanical Tunneling
J. H. Fermor
Am. J. Phys. 34, 1168–1170 (1966)
https://doi.org/10.1119/1.1972543

Phenomenological manifestations of quantum‐mechanical tunneling. I. Curvature in Arrhenius plots
Marvin J. Stern; Ralph E. Weston, Jr.
J. Chem. Phys. 60, 2803–2807 (1974)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1681447

Phase‐integral approach to quantum‐mechanical tunneling
Nils Dalarsson
J. Math. Phys. 34, 4436–4440 (1993)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.530349

Quantum‐mechanical tunneling and finite elements
R. Goloskie; J. W. Kramer; L. R. Ram‐Mohan
Comput. Phys. 8, 679–686 (1994)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.168485

Quantum mechanical tunneling through a time‐dependent barrier
Jiu‐Yuan Ge; John Z. H. Zhang
J. Chem. Phys. 105, 8628–8632 (1996)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.472644

Resonant escape in Josephson tunnel junctions under millimeter-wave irradiation
J. N. Kämmerer; S. Masis; K. Hambardzumyan; P. Lenhard; U. Strobel; J. Lisenfeld; H. Rotzinger; A. V. Ustinov
Appl. Phys. Lett. 126, 172602 (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0258193

An engineering guide to superconducting quantum circuit shielding
Elizaveta I. Malevannaya; Viktor I. Polozov; Anton I. Ivanov; Aleksei R. Matanin; Nikita S. Smirnov; Vladimir V. Echeistov; Dmitry O. Moskalev; Dmitry A. Mikhalin; Denis E. Shirokov; Yuri V. Panfilov; Ilya A. Ryzhikov; Aleksander V. Andriyash; Ilya A. Rodionov
Appl. Phys. Rev. 12, 031334 (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0250262

Chemistry: Susumu Kitagawa

Open framework materials for energy applications
Dan Zhao; Anthony Cheetham; Shuhei Furukawa; Susumu Kitagawa; Qiang Xu; Wei Zhang; Ruqiang Zou
APL Mater. 8, 040401 (2020)
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0007054

Pressure-induced amorphization of a dense coordination polymer and its impact on proton conductivity
Daiki Umeyama; Satoshi Horike; Cedric Tassel; Hiroshi Kageyama; Yuji Higo; Keisuke Hagi; Naoki Ogiwara; Susumu Kitagawa
APL Mater. 2, 124401 (2014)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4898806

The RIKEN Materials Science Beamline at SPring‐8: Towards Visualization of Electrostatic Interaction
Kenichi Kato; Raita Hirose; Michitaka Takemoto; Sunyeo Ha; Jungeun Kim; Masakazu Higuchi; Ryotaro Matsuda; Susumu Kitagawa; Masaki Takata
AIP Conf. Proc. 1234, 875–878 (2010)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3463354

Chemistry: Topical Articles

Metal–organic framework thin films with well-controlled growth directions confirmed by x-ray study
Kazuya Otsubo; Hiroshi Kitagawa
APL Mater. 2, 124105 (2014)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4899295

Porous, rigid metal(III)-carboxylate metal-organic frameworks for the delivery of nitric oxide
Jarrod F. Eubank; Paul S. Wheatley; Gaëlle Lebars; Alistair C. McKinlay; Hervé Leclerc; Patricia Horcajada; Marco Daturi; Alexandre Vimont; Russell E. Morris; Christian Serre
APL Mater. 2, 124112 (2014)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4904069

Experimental and theoretical investigations of the electronic band structure of metal-organic frameworks of HKUST-1 type
Zhi-Gang Gu; Lars Heinke; Christof Wöll; Tobias Neumann; Wolfgang Wenzel; Qiang Li; Karin Fink; Ovidiu D. Gordan; Dietrich R. T. Zahn
Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 183301 (2015)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4934737

First-principles Hubbard U approach for small molecule binding in metal-organic frameworks
Gregory W. Mann; Kyuho Lee; Matteo Cococcioni; Berend Smit; Jeffrey B. Neaton
J. Chem. Phys. 144, 174104 (2016)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4947240

Metal-organic frameworks as promising candidates for future ultralow-k dielectrics
K. Zagorodniy; G. Seifert; H. Hermann
Appl. Phys. Lett. 97, 251905 (2010)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3529461

Understanding hydrogen sorption in a polar metal-organic framework with constricted channels
Abraham C. Stern; Jonathan L. Belof; Mohamed Eddaoudi; Brian Space
J. Chem. Phys. 136, 034705 (2012)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3668138

Adsorption of selected gases on metal-organic frameworks and covalent organic frameworks: A comparative grand canonical Monte Carlo simulation
Lili Wang; Lu Wang; Jijun Zhao; Tianying Yan
J. Appl. Phys. 111, 112628 (2012)
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4726255

  • On behalf of APL Quantum, I congratulate John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis on the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. Their demonstrations of macroscopic quantum tunnelling and energy quantisation in superconducting circuits proved that a macroscopic degree of freedom can behave as a single quantum system—laying the foundations for today’s circuit QED and superconducting qubit platforms.

    APL Quantum seeks to bridge fundamental quantum science with quantum technologies. This prize exemplifies that arc: rigorous theory tied to experiment, transforming basic insight into an engineered quantum toolbox for various applications.

    As we move from ‘science is quantum’ to ‘quantum is science and technology,’ this landmark achievement inspires us to champion contributions that are at once conceptually clear, experimentally exacting, and technologically enabling.
    Ortwin Hess
    Editor in Chief, APL Quantum

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