Google's Michel Devoret is one of the 2025 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics to Google's Chief Scientist of Quantum Hardware, Michel Devoret, along with former Google employee John Martinis and University of California, Berkeley professor John Clarke. The award recognizes their "discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit." The group's work on Josephson Junctions in the 1980s laid the foundation for today's superconducting quantum bits (qubits), which are crucial for the development of quantum computing. Google's Quantum AI team has been actively working on creating the fundamental components for quantum computers, with the Willow quantum chip being a recent example. The Nobel Committee chair, Olle Eriksson, highlighted the continuous surprises offered by century-old quantum mechanics and its immense practical utility as the foundation of all digital technology.