Two UC Santa Barbara professors were awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in physics for their experiments on an electrical circuit that showed quantum physics in action.
Michel Devoret and John Martinis were honored alongside John Clarke from UC Berkeley on Oct. 7 by the The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
UCSB Chancellor Dennis Assanis said it was a “profound thrill” and “a moment of exceptional pride” to congratulate Devoret, Martinis, and Clarke.
“Their successful efforts to build an electronic circuit with superconductors and measure their properties in the 1980s has had a transformational and lasting influence on today’s technology, paving the way for components that we find in everyday devices such as our cellphones, as well as for major advancements in communication, computing and sensing,” Assanis said in a statement Tuesday. “The impact of their work cannot be overstated. We look forward to celebrating their accomplishments.”
In 1984 and 1985, the three men started a series of experiments with an electronic circuit that was built using materials that carry electricity with no resistance, known as superconductors.
In the circuit, the superconducting components were separated by a thin non-conducting layer, known as Josephson junction. Doing this allowed the men to control and explore the phenomenon that arose when they passed a current through the circuit.
When they did that, the charged particles moved through the superconductor like they were one big particle that moved through the entire circuit, according to a Nobel Prize news release.
Theses findings paved the way for major technological advancements in cell phones, data storage devices, and LED lighting, according to UCSB.
Martinis said he was a graduate student when he worked with Devoret and Clarke on these experiments.
“This was a fantastic experience to be mentored by two wonderful people and great physicists,” Martinis said at a UCSB press conference Tuesday afternoon. “We all had our own unique style and way we do things, but I learned so much from them. Throughout my whole career, I was kind of trying to recreate that spirit that we had in there.”
While Martinis said he’s received calls and emails throughout the day, the most special thing to him has been hearing from former students sharing their congratulations.
Martinis and Devoret are UCSB’s seventh and eighth nobel prize laureates.
“It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way that century-old quantum mechanics continually offers new surprises,” said Olle Eriksson, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics. “It is also enormously useful, as quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technology.”
Martinis, who earned his doctorate in physics in 1987 from Berkeley under the guidance of Clarke, arrived at UCSB in 2004.
In 2014, he and his team were hired by Google Quantum AI to build a quantum computer. In 2020 he resigned from Google and joined Australian startup Silicon Quantum Computing. In 2022 he co-founded the quantum computing company Qolab, where he serves as Chief Technology Officer, according to a UCSB news release.
Devoret received his doctorate in condensed matter physics from University of Paris, Orsay, in 1982, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Clarke’s lab at Berkeley from 1982-84.
He was an applied physics professor at Yale University from 2002-2024 before joining the UCSB faculty. He is also the Chief Scientist at Google Quantum AI, according to a UCSB news release.
Google’s Quantum AI lab is in Goleta.