Nobel Prize in Physics Is Awarded for Work in Quantum Mechanics

The New York Times: John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday in Sweden for showing that two properties of quantum mechanics, the physical laws that rule the subatomic realm, could be observed on a system large enough to see with the naked eye. They will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kroner, or around $1.17 million.

'There is no advanced technology today that does not rely on quantum mechanics,' Olle Eriksson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates' discoveries, he added, paved the way for technologies like the cellphone, cameras and fiber optic cables.

It also helped lay the groundwork for current attempts to build a quantum computer, a device that could compute and process information at speeds that would not be possible with classical computer. Martinis worked at Google from 2014 to 2020 to build a quantum computer and led the quantum supremacy experiment in 2019. Devoret is cited in Google's recent breakthrough where its Willow quantum chip solved a problem in five minutes that the world's most advanced supercomputer could never solve.

The three laureates conducted experiments with electrical circuits that demonstrated quantum mechanical tunneling and quantized energy levels in systems large enough to hold in the hand. Clarke is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Devoret joined his research group in the 1980s and is now at Yale University and UC Santa Barbara. Martinis also joined the group in the 1980s and is currently at UC Santa Barbara and co-founded Qolab, a startup developing utility-scale superconducting quantum computers.

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