The Nobel for Physics 2025 goes to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis for a series of revolutionary experiments on the quantum tunnel effect.
John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis won the Nobel Prize for Physics 2025 “for the discovery of the macroscopic quantum tunnel effect and the quantization of energy in an electrical circuit”. The three scientists have been rewarded for a series of revolutionary experiments that have shown how the quantum tunnel effect can be observed on a macroscopic scale, involving many particles.
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John Clarke, born in 1942, is a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, the United States. Michel H. Devoret, from 1953, teaches at the universities of Yale and California in Santa Barbara (United States). John M. Martinis, born in 1958, is also a professor at the University of California.
Nobel for physics: historical curiosities
The Nobel Prize for Physics, established by the Testament of Alfred Nobel in 1895, is assigned as that for chemistry by the Swedish Real Academy of Sciences.
From 1901 to today 118 Nobel prizes have been awarded for physics to 227 scientists (technically 226: one of them, John Bardeen, was awarded twice, in 1956 for the invention of the transistor, together with William Bradford Shockley and Walter Brattain, and in 1972 for the fundamental theory of ordinary superconductivity together with Leon Neil Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer). Only 5 of the awarded scientists of the Nobeling for physics are women. One of these is Marie Curie, who won the Nobel for physics in 1903 (for research on radioactive phenomena, halfway with the French physique Henri Becquerel) and that for chemistry in 1911, for the discovery of Radio and Polonio.
Of the awarded prizes, 47 were given to a single scientist, 33 were shared by two scientists and 38 by three. The youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics was the British physicist and crystallograph Lawrence Bragg, who was 25 years old when he was awarded, in 1915, for studies conducted on the analysis of the crystalline structure by means of the X -rays together with his father. The oldest was the US physicist Arthur Ashkin, who arrived at the Nobel in 2018 at the age of 96 thanks to the revolutionary inventions in the field of laser physics, together with Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou.
In 2024, the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for the fundamental discoveries and inventions that allow automatic learning with artificial neural networks”.
