This has ramifications for future breakthroughs: “John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments revealing macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization in superconducting circuits, laying the groundwork for quantum computers and sensors.”
Gizmodo has a great article on this:
On the centennial of modern quantum mechanics, the Nobel Committee awarded the year’s most prestigious physics prize to an experiment that demonstrated how quantum effects play out on large scales—including inside your smartphone.
Imagine throwing a tennis ball against a wall. Millennia of both scientific and anecdotal observations teach that the ball will likely hit the wall and bounce back. In the quantum world, however, that isn’t always the case. There, the ball might pass straight through the wall and appear on the other side—a phenomenon referred to as “tunneling.”
Size is a tricky concept in quantum mechanics, but very simply speaking, “microscopic” scales in this context generally refer to that of a single particle. By contrast, “macroscopic” refers to a large number of particles. Quantum mechanical effects appear to fade on the macroscopic scale, hence why a tennis ball—comprised of a gazillion particles—typically doesn’t pass through walls.
But the Nobel-winning experiment created a highly sophisticated, superconducting circuit that enabled electrons inside to move through the system as if they were a single particle, filling the entire circuit. The electrons in the system tunneled through a thin layer of non-conductive material—and thus, the circuit, which the researchers had described as being “big enough to get one’s grubby fingers on,” is a macroscopic demonstration of a microscopic, or quantum, phenomenon.
Read the whole article; it’s fascinating.
Open thread.
