3 US scientists get Physics Nobel for quantum mechanics

John Clarke, Michel H Devoret and John M Martinis won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for research on the weird world of sub-atomic quantum tunnelling that advances the power of everyday digital communications and computing.

One of the winners said quantum mechanics research already has wound up in our everyday communications. Speaking from his cellphone, Clarke said: “One of the underlying reasons that cellphones work is because of all this work.”

Clarke (83) conducted his research at the University of California, Berkeley; Martinis (67) at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Devoret (72) is at Yale and also at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Clarke, who spearheaded the research team, said he was “pleased to receive this prize” alongside his two colleagues.

Martinis’ wife, Jean, told reporters, who called at his home some two-and-a-half hours after the announcement, that he was still asleep and did not yet know. She said in the past they had stayed up on the night of the physics award, but at some point they decided that sleep was more important.

Devoret could not immediately be contacted.

The prize-winning research in the mid-1980s took the sub-atomic “weirdness of quantum mechanics” and found how those tiny interactions can have real world applications on the human-scale level, said Jonathan Bagger, CEO of the American Physical Society. They have the potential to supercharge computing and communications.

The 100-year-old field of quantum mechanics deals with the seemingly impossible subatomic world where switches can be on-and-off at the same time and parts of atoms tunnel through what seems like impenetrable barriers.

“What the three physicists did is taking the scale of something that we can’t see, we can’t touch, we can’t feel and bringing it up to the scale of something recognisable and make it something you can build upon,” said Physics Today editor-in-chief Richard Fitzgerald, who in the 1990s worked in the field on a competitors’ group.

The work is a crucial building block in the fast-developing world of quantum mechanics.

“Quantum computers is one very sort of obvious use, but they’re also can be used for quantum sensors, so to be able to make very sensitive measurements of, for example, magnetic fields, and perhaps also for cryptography, so to encode information so it cannot be easily listened to by a third party,” Mark Pearce, a professor of astrophysics and Nobel Physics Committee member, said.