♦ United States based scientists John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for research into quantum mechanical tunneling.

♦ The winners carried out experiments in the mid-1980s with an electronic circuit built of superconductors and demonstrated that quantum mechanical properties could be made concrete on a much larger, macroscopic scale.

♦ British-born Clarke is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States.

♦ Devoret, born in France, is a professor at Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, also in the United States, where Martinis is also a professor. Martinis, an American, headed Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab up until he resigned in 2020.

♦ The prizes carry priceless prestige and a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million).

♦ It is the 119th time the prize has been awarded. Last year (2024), artificial intelligence pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the physics prize for helping create the building blocks of machine learning.