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Tag: John Martinis

  • California physicist and Nobel laureate John Martinis won’t quit on quantum computers

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    A California physicist and Nobel laureate who laid the foundation for quantum computing isn’t done working.

    For the last 40 years, John Martinis has worked — mostly within California — to create the fastest computers ever built.

    “It’s kind of my professional dream to do this by the time I’m really too old to retire. I should retire now, but I’m not doing that,” the now 67-year-old said.

    Born and raised in San Pedro, Martinis said his California high school teachers influenced him to pursue his career. A physics teacher got him interested in the topic, he said, and a math teacher taught him rigor, work ethic and organization.

    “I think before then I’d just write down the solution” rather than showing his process, he joked in an interview with The Times.

    As an undergraduate senior at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, he met John Clarke, a British physicist and professor who would become his graduate advisor and Michel Devoret, a French physicist who worked with him as a postdoctoral researcher.

    John Clarke, right, a professor emeritus of physics, looks on during a celebration at UC Berkeley on Oct. 7, 2025, after he and fellow physicists Michel Devoret and John Martinis were awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in physics for their work on quantum tunneling.

    (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

    “This was a fantastic experience, to be mentored by two wonderful people,” he said during a news conference Tuesday at UC Santa Barbara, where he works as a professor. “I learned so much from them that, through my whole career, I was kind of trying to re-create that spirit that we had in there.”

    Martinis was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in physics, alongside Clarke and Devoret, for his doctoral project, a series of experiments in the mid-1980s that proved quantum tunneling was possible with large objects, which became the basis for the development of quantum computers as well as much of the current research in that field.

    Both Clarke and Devoret are based in the U.S. and associated with the University of California system — Clarke as a professor emeritus at Berkeley and Devoret as a professor at UC Santa Barbara.

    “I loved Berkeley. It was great to be taught by these really amazing professors,” Martinis said, noting the university’s cutting-edge facilities that supported the experiments. “As a student, I could focus on just being a good scientist.”

    Martinis went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship in France, then returned stateside to Boulder, Colo., where he worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a U.S. government lab. In 2008 he moved back to California to work at UC Santa Barbara as a professor, and in 2014, Google hired him and Devoret to create an experimental quantum processor faster than any human supercomputer — which his team completed five years later.

    “It really was all this basic research we did for decades that enabled this to happen and enabled us to have a vision … to build this thing,” Martinis said.

    He chose UC Santa Barbara as a workplace not just because of the great location and weather, but also for its advanced facilities and community. Researchers from other disciplines — such as engineers and materials scientists who build semiconductors — are able to freely communicate and collaborate with his team.

    “Working with talented and friendly people at the university is really special,” he said. “You can actually get things done.”

    Martinis said he has enjoyed hearing back from former students who have reached out to celebrate his award. Speaking to students years after they take his classes and grasp the effect on their lives has been refreshing. His work over the years has spawned an industry that created thousands of well-paying jobs for people across the country, he said.

    He praised the UC system for its culture and collaboration with the private sector and government, but said that research and development for quantum computers in the U.S. must urgently speed up if we expect to see it in our lifetimes.

    After leaving Google in 2020, Martinis co-founded his private company, QoLab, in 2022 with a belief that advanced semiconductor chips are the path to achieving usable quantum computers. The company has begun collaborating with other startup companies and academic groups involved in semiconductor production, he said.

    “I think this collaborative model is going to be more fruitful because we really get a lot of interesting ideas,” Martinis said. “We have a lot to catch up on. But it’s a very good atmosphere to invent things.”

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    Sandra McDonald

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  • Nobel Prize in physics goes to trio of researchers for discoveries in quantum mechanics

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    The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists – a Briton, a Frenchman and an American – for their ground-breaking discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics.John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis will share the prize “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit,” the Nobel Committee announced Tuesday at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden.The committee praised the laureates for demonstrating that the “bizarre properties of the quantum world can be made concrete in a system big enough to be held in the hand.”Clarke, taking questions at a news conference, said he was “completely stunned” to learn he had won the award.“We had not realized in any way that this might be the basis of a Nobel Prize,” Clarke said of their research in the 1980s at the University of California, Berkeley.Quantum mechanics, which describes how matter and energy behaves at or below the scale of an atom, allows a particle to pass straight through a barrier, in a process called “tunnelling.”But when a larger number of particles are involved, these quantum mechanical effects usually become insignificant. What is true at the microscopic level was not thought to be true at the macroscopic level. For instance, while a single atom could pass through a barrier, a tennis ball – made up of a huge amount of particles – cannot.However, the trio of researchers conducted experiments to show that quantum tunnelling can also be observed on a macroscopic scale.In 1984 and 1985, the trio developed a superconducting electrical system that could pass from one physical state to another, as if a tennis ball could move straight through a barrier and not bounce back.Anthony Leggett, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2003, compared the laureates’ work on how quantum mechanics functions on a larger scale to the famous thought experiment of Erwin Schrödinger, another physics laureate.To show the paradoxical nature of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger imagined a cat in a sealed box with a device that releases poison when a radioactive source decays. Because there is no way to observe whether the cat is dead or alive, Schrödinger posited that the cat was both dead and alive simultaneously – just as, in quantum mechanics, a system can exist in multiple states at once until measured.Schrödinger’s thought experiment aimed to show the absurdity of this situation, because quantum mechanics doesn’t make sense on the scale of everyday objects, such as a cat.Leggett argued, however, that the experiments conducted by Clarke, Devoret and Martinis showed that there are phenomena on larger scales that behave just as quantum mechanics predicts.Clarke said their research had helped pave the way for technological advances, such as the creation of the cell phone.“There is no advanced technology used today that does not rely on quantum mechanics, including mobile phones, cameras… and fiber optic cables,” said the Nobel committee.Last year, the prize was awarded to Geoffrey Hinton – often called the “Godfather of AI” – and John Hopfield, for their fundamental discoveries in machine learning, which paved the way for how artificial intelligence is used today.In 2023, the prize went to a trio of European scientists who used lasers to understand the rapid movement of electrons, which were previously thought impossible to follow.The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).

    STOCKHOLM —

    The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists – a Briton, a Frenchman and an American – for their ground-breaking discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics.

    John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis will share the prize “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit,” the Nobel Committee announced Tuesday at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden.

    The committee praised the laureates for demonstrating that the “bizarre properties of the quantum world can be made concrete in a system big enough to be held in the hand.”

    Clarke, taking questions at a news conference, said he was “completely stunned” to learn he had won the award.

    “We had not realized in any way that this might be the basis of a Nobel Prize,” Clarke said of their research in the 1980s at the University of California, Berkeley.

    Quantum mechanics, which describes how matter and energy behaves at or below the scale of an atom, allows a particle to pass straight through a barrier, in a process called “tunnelling.”

    But when a larger number of particles are involved, these quantum mechanical effects usually become insignificant. What is true at the microscopic level was not thought to be true at the macroscopic level. For instance, while a single atom could pass through a barrier, a tennis ball – made up of a huge amount of particles – cannot.

    However, the trio of researchers conducted experiments to show that quantum tunnelling can also be observed on a macroscopic scale.

    In 1984 and 1985, the trio developed a superconducting electrical system that could pass from one physical state to another, as if a tennis ball could move straight through a barrier and not bounce back.

    Anthony Leggett, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2003, compared the laureates’ work on how quantum mechanics functions on a larger scale to the famous thought experiment of Erwin Schrödinger, another physics laureate.

    To show the paradoxical nature of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger imagined a cat in a sealed box with a device that releases poison when a radioactive source decays. Because there is no way to observe whether the cat is dead or alive, Schrödinger posited that the cat was both dead and alive simultaneously – just as, in quantum mechanics, a system can exist in multiple states at once until measured.

    Schrödinger’s thought experiment aimed to show the absurdity of this situation, because quantum mechanics doesn’t make sense on the scale of everyday objects, such as a cat.

    Leggett argued, however, that the experiments conducted by Clarke, Devoret and Martinis showed that there are phenomena on larger scales that behave just as quantum mechanics predicts.

    Clarke said their research had helped pave the way for technological advances, such as the creation of the cell phone.

    “There is no advanced technology used today that does not rely on quantum mechanics, including mobile phones, cameras… and fiber optic cables,” said the Nobel committee.

    Last year, the prize was awarded to Geoffrey Hinton – often called the “Godfather of AI” – and John Hopfield, for their fundamental discoveries in machine learning, which paved the way for how artificial intelligence is used today.

    In 2023, the prize went to a trio of European scientists who used lasers to understand the rapid movement of electrons, which were previously thought impossible to follow.

    The prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million).

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