UC Santa Barbara physicists Win 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics
UC Santa Barbara physicists John Martinis and Michel Devoret, alongside UC Berkeley’s John Clarke, have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering experiments that revealed quantum tunneling and energy quantization in superconducting circuits. Their work with Josephson junctions in the 1980s laid the foundation for today’s digital technologies and future quantum computing. This marks UCSB’s eighth faculty Nobel. We celebrate their lasting impact on communication, computing, and sensing technologies.
UC Santa Barbara physicists John Martinis and Michel Devoret have been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. Selected for the honor alongside UC Berkeley physicist and former advisor John Clarke, they were lauded for work that, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “revealed quantum physics in action.”
“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.” —Olle Erikkson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.
Devoret and Martinis bring the number of UCSB faculty Nobel Prize winners to eight; alumna Carol Greider received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
“It is a great honor to be awarded the Nobel prize,” “I am grateful to have worked with John Clarke and Michel Devoret during my PhD thesis, as they taught me how to do compelling experiments. The global physics community has also contributed greatly to the success of superconducting qubits. Next, let’s build a useful quantum computer!” —Martinis.
The trio, who were cited “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit,” developed a series of experiments in 1984 and 1985 in which they built an electronic circuit out of superconducting components, each component separated by a thin layer of nonconductive material — a setup known as a Josephson junction. By controlling and measuring the phenomena that arose when they passed a current through it, they were able to demonstrate behaviors such as quantum tunnelling, and that, true to prediction, energy in a quantum mechanical system is quantised — that is, the system absorbs or emits only certain specific amounts of energy.