Quantum leap: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for groundbreaking discovery

Briton John Clarke, Frenchman Michel Devoret and American John Martinis won the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for work on quantum physics in action, the Nobel jury said.

The trio was honoured “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit,” the jury said.

Quantum mechanics describes how differently things work on incredibly small scales.

For example, when a normal ball hits a wall, it bounces back. But on the quantum scale, a particle will actually pass straight through a comparable wall – a phenomenon called “tunnelling”.

Tuesday’s prize was awarded for experiments in the 1980s which showed that quantum tunnelling can also be observed on a macroscopic scale involving multiple particles by using superconductors.

In a series of experiments, the researchers showed that “the bizarre properties of the quantum world can be made concrete in a system big enough to be held in the hand,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.