Trio who made foundational quantum computing discovery bag Nobel physics prize

Studies at UC Berkeley in the 1980s paved the way for quantum computing and cryptography

Three researchers in sub-atomic physics have been awarded a Nobel prize for work which helped lay the foundations for quantum computing.

John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis were awarded the esteemed gong today for experiments they conducted in 1984 and 1985, which demonstrated quantum phenomena at the macro-level, which was unprecedented at the time.

The Nobel Prize in Physics committee argued the work helped establish the fundamentals for the coming generation of quantum technology, including quantum cryptography, quantum computers, and quantum sensors.

“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises. It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology,” said Olle Eriksson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics in a prepared statement.

Frenchman Devoret was a graduate and postgraduate at the Orsay Faculty of Sciences (Paris-Sud), while Martinis attended the University of California at Berkeley from 1976 to 1987. Clarke was born in the UK and was an undergraduate and postgraduate physics student at Cambridge University. On receiving the Nobel prize, Clarke told the media he was “completely stunned.”

“We had not realized in any way that this might be the basis of a Nobel Prize,” Clarke said.

The three worked together in the 1980s at the University of California, Berkeley, where Clarke is still based today.

The group built an electric circuit of superconductors, creating an arrangement known as a Josephson junction by separating the superconducting components with a thin layer of non-conductive material. They were able to show that the arrangement could behave as a single particle in a state in which current flows without any voltage. The system can escape this macroscopic zero-voltage state through quantum tunnelling, which is detected by the appearance of a voltage.

Speaking to the media, Jonathan Bagger, an American particle physicist and CEO of the American Physical Society, said that in the early years of quantum mechanics, it was assumed to be applicable “only to very esoteric situations.” He said that the trio receiving the Nobel Prize had shown that its laws could apply “to the observable, to the larger world, to the human scale world.” ®