Physics Nobel 2025: Quantum Tunneling

By Shlomo Maital  

  The Nobel Prize for Physics, 2025, was given to John Clarke (U. of California, Berkeley), Michel Devoret, Yale, and John Martinis, U. of California Santa Barbara. 

   Forty years ago (!!!), in 1984 and 1985, their experiments with an electronic circuit made of superconductors showed that quantum mechanical properties (something called quantum tunneling, which enables electrons to flow freely without resistance and hence controllable) can be created way above tiny atomic scale, in an apparatus large enough to be useful.

  Fast forward:  This is largely the basis of modern semiconductors, such as transistors.

  The Nobel Committee has clearly done some homework and traced back to the early pioneering work that has been the basis of modern electronics and computing. 

    Note how early basic scientific research has generated massively powerful new technologies, in a manner that was surprising and rather unpredictable.  When the prize winners did their research and published it, I doubt they could foresee the revolutionary new technologies that would result.

      Basic research is vital. It struggles to get funding – but virtually all great new technologies derive from early scientific discoveries by bold researchers, who ask hard basic questions – and succeed in answering them.