A hand-sized circuit showed quantum effects usually seen only in single atoms
In the mid-1980s, John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis cooled a superconducting circuit cold enough to catch it tunnelling through an energy barrier and sitting in distinct quantized energy levels, behaviour physics says only single particles should show. That work became the basis of today's superconducting quantum computers, and won the trio the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.