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The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a team of scientists based in the U.S. for their landmark discovery in quantum mechanics.
John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were handed 11 million Swedish Kronor ($1.17 million) for their work.
The trio’s experiments demonstrated that the strange laws and properties of the quantum world can have measurable effects in everyday science.
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John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis won the Nobel Prize for Physics (AP)
These discoveries included developing a superconducting electrical system that could “tunnel” from one physical state to another. “Tunnelling” is a process which mimics a ball passing through a wall instead of bouncing back after impact.
Martinis, based at University of California Santa Barbara, and his colleagues originally conducted the experiments in the 1980s, with their work still being used in research today.
Each of them will be awarded with gold medals by the king of Sweden.
Both Martinis and Devoret, a French physicist at Yale University, have previously worked for Google Quantum AI to develop supercomputers for the company.
Clarke, their colleague on their Nobel Prize winning discovery, is a British scientist based at the University of California at Berkeley. He described the win as “the surprise of my life.”
According to him, the three men found out about their win via a phone call. “I am completely stunned. It had never occurred to me that this might be the basis of a Nobel prize,” he said.
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This illustration demonstrates how the team’s discovery works (©Johan Jarnestad/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)
The winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics were revealed at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
“There is no advanced technology used today that does not rely on quantum mechanics, including mobile phones, cameras…and fibre optic cables,” the Nobel committee said when revealing the winners.
“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises,” added Olle Eriksson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics. “It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology.”
“Our discovery, in some ways, is the basis of quantum computing,” Clarke added.
Quantum mechanics is the study of how light and matter behave on an atomic and subatomic scale.
More follows on this breaking story…
