John Clarke
Facts
Ill. Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach
John Clarke
Nobel Prize in Physics 2025
Born: 1942, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Affiliation at the time of the award: University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Prize motivation: “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit”
Prize share: 1/3
Work
In quantum mechanics, particles can move straight through a barrier, in a process called tunnelling. Quantum mechanical behaviour is mainly exhibited at extremely microscopic scales. However, in 1984 and 1985, John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis demonstrated quantum mechanical properties on a macroscopic scale. In an electrical circuit built from superconductors – which conduct current without any resistance – tunnelling through an insulating layer occurred because the charged particles behaved as a single particle.
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