Stockholm, Sweden – Three scientists at American universities have won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on quantum mechanics.

John Clarke, Michel H Devoret, and John M Martinis were awarded the prize on Tuesday for the ‘discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit’.

Working in the 1980s at the University of California Berkley, the trio – a Briton, a Frenchman, and an American – carried out experiments using an electrical circuit that demonstrated both quantum tunnelling and quantised energy levels at a larger level, said the announcement made at Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Quantum mechanics enables a particle to pass straight through a barrier, a phenomenon known as tunnelling. Normally, when large numbers of particles are involved, such quantum effects fade away.

But the laureates’ experiments showed that ‘bizarre properties of the quantum world can be made concrete in a system big enough to be held in the hand’.

From 1901 to 2024, 118 Nobel Prizes were awarded in physics. Five of the 227 physics winners have been women, including Marie Curie in 1903.

In 2024, the Nobel in Physics was awarded to John J Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton ‘for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks’.

The late John Bardeen, a condensed matter physicist, is the only laureate to have won the prize twice, first in 1956 and then in 1972.

The Nobel Prizes were created by the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. It comes with a cash award of 11mn Swedish kroner, which is more than €997,000.

The rest of the 2025 Nobel Prizes, awarded for advancements in chemistry, literature, and toward peace, will be announced throughout the week. The economics prize will be granted on October 13.

The Nobel laureates will receive their prizes at an awards ceremony in Sweden in December.

Agencies