Quantum tunneling trio win the 2025 physics Nobel

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis have won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments that revealed quantum behavior in electrical circuits, showing that even systems made of billions of atoms can obey the strange laws of the quantum world.Hans Ellegren of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the trio will share the 11 million Swedish kronor (about US $1.2 million) prize “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.” The results of their experiments at the University of California, Berkeley, where Clarke is a professor emeritus, proved that superconducting circuits can act as a single quantum object, a breakthrough that laid the foundation for modern quantum computing.Quantum computers are expected to revolutionize chemistry , since they can simulate molecular interactions helping to design new drugs, materials and catalysts from first principles without the need for expensive real life testing.The demonstration of quantum effects on a macroscopic scale has stimulated the imagination of chemists, says Markus Reiher, a quantum chemist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich. “Wouldn't it be amazing if quantum mechanics would play a more extensive role in chemistry, beyond that of electronic structure, photoexcitation, and proton tunneling?”The year 2025, the United Nations’ International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, has brought quantum computing into the global spotlight. Yet Clarke confessed that he never imagined that those early experiments would one day be Nobel worthy. “To put it mildly, it was the