Meet Clarke, Devoret and Martinis — the 2025 Nobel laureates who brought quantum tunnelling to life

In the quiet corridors of the University of California, Berkeley, sometime in the mid-1980s, three physicists -- John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis -- were building what looked like an unremarkable circuit.

Small enough to fit on a fingertip, it was hardly the stuff of science headlines. As per the foundation's official release, the simple superconducting device would go on to prove that the ghostly rules of quantum mechanics -- tunnelling, energy quantisation, and all -- could exist in something visible, tangible, and human-sized.

Four decades later, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the trio the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics, “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”


Their story is of curiosity, persistence, and an unlikely collaboration that connected three very different minds.

Also Read: Nobel Prize 2025 in Physics awarded to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis for breakthroughs in quantum tunnelling

John Clarke

John Clarke’s fascination with superconductivity began long before quantum computing became fashionable. Born in 1942 in Cambridge, he grew up in the postwar era when physics was the frontier of everything -- from space to atoms.

After earning his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1968, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he would spend his entire career probing the quantum properties of superconductors.

Clarke’s style has always been understated, more benchwork than bravado. Colleagues remember him as meticulous, even meditative, about measurements. His laboratory was famous for its order: wires neatly coiled, instruments labelled, and no room for noise, literally or metaphorically.

He was fascinated by what he once called “the invisible landscape of superconducting circuits” -- systems so delicate that even the hum of a nearby power line could ruin an experiment. Clarke didn’t chase glamour; he chased precision. It’s that temperament that made Berkeley’s low-temperature lab the perfect place for one of physics’ most delicate tests.

Michel Devoret

When Michel H. Devoret joined Clarke’s group as a postdoctoral researcher in the early 1980s, he brought a European flavour of theoretical boldness to Clarke’s empirical calm. Born in 1953 in Paris, Devoret had completed his doctorate at the École Normale Supérieure, a place that prized deep, abstract thinking.

At Berkeley, he found a mentor in Clarke and a partner in curiosity in John Martinis. Devoret had the instinct to ask, “What if?” -- the kind of question that could keep an experiment alive through countless failed trials.

“John had the patience, John M. had the spark,” he would later recall of their collaboration.

Devoret’s later career took him to Yale University, where he became one of the world’s leading figures in quantum electronics. His work now sits at the crossroads of theory and technology, from superconducting circuits to quantum computing.

Yet he often credits those years in Clarke’s Berkeley lab as the period when “quantum physics became real.”

John Martinis

John M. Martinis, born in 1958, was still a graduate student when the experiment that changed his career took shape. While Clarke was the steady hand and Devoret the conceptual spark, Martinis was the one who built, tuned, and rebuilt the apparatus until it behaved exactly as they needed it to.

He was the youngest of the trio, the one who saw in their early work not just proof of quantum phenomena, but the seed of a technology.

Years later, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he would lead experiments that used superconducting circuits as quantum bits, or qubits, a crucial step toward the quantum computers now being developed by research groups and companies worldwide.

Martinis is often described as “the engineer among physicists” -- restless, practical, and more likely to be found adjusting cables than debating wave functions. But that pragmatism is precisely what made the Berkeley experiments possible.

A collaboration that bridged worlds

The partnership between Clarke, Devoret, and Martinis was a study in contrasts -- British precision, French curiosity, and Californian pragmatism. Together, they built an experiment so sensitive it had to be shielded from every stray vibration and magnetic field.

Their goal was deceptively simple: to see whether a macroscopic system could behave like a quantum one. What they found was astonishing. The superconducting circuit, composed of billions of Cooper pairs acting in unison, could “tunnel” from one energy state to another, generating a voltage where none should exist. It was as if the circuit had passed through an invisible wall.

They also proved that the system’s energy levels were quantised, it absorbed and emitted energy in fixed packets, just as quantum theory predicted. The discovery brought the microscopic rules of the universe into the realm of circuits and wires.

From quantum thought experiment to quantum technology

In later years, theorist Anthony Leggett would compare their discovery to a real-world version of Schrödinger’s cat -- a system that was both macroscopic and quantum. “It showed that the strange behaviour of the quantum world doesn’t vanish when you scale up,” Leggett noted.

That insight transformed quantum research. Their “artificial atom,” as some physicists now call it, became the prototype for quantum devices that manipulate energy states to process information. Martinis later used those same principles to create superconducting qubits, the basic units of a quantum computer.

In a sense, what began as an experiment about tunnelling turned into a foundation for the next era of computation.

Three paths, one legacy

Today, the three laureates represent different chapters of the same story. Clarke, now in his eighties, remains a revered figure at Berkeley, his work still cited in cutting-edge superconductivity research.

Devoret continues at Yale, where his Quantum Nanoelectronics Laboratory pushes the boundaries of quantum coherence and control.

Martinis, after years at UC Santa Barbara and Google’s Quantum AI Lab, remains at the forefront of the race to build scalable quantum computers.

Each of them brought something essential -- Clarke’s rigour, Devoret’s imagination, Martinis’s craftsmanship. Their shared discovery bridged theory and touch, showing that quantum behaviour isn’t confined to the invisible world of atoms.