Editor’s Note: Today, Googler Michel Devoret and Google Alumnus John Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, which joined 2024 Nobel recipients Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and Geoff Hinton. The company is now celebrating five Nobel Prize winners, including three prizes in the last two years.
This morning, Michel Devoret, currently at Google as Chief Scientist for Quantum Hardware at the Quantum AI team, is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2025. Michel shares the honor with John Martinis, former hardware leader at Google Quantum AI, and John Clarke of the University of California, Berkeley.
Our Quantum AI team is incredibly proud to see Michel and John recognized for their groundbreaking work, and that’s another exciting moment at Google. They join a prominent group of now 5 Nobel-winning googles and alumni, including 2024 winners Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and Geoffrey Hinton.
Quantum mechanics in a macroscopic scale
This award celebrates a series of careful experiments conducted in the 1980s that had a revolutionary influence on physics and technology. Michel, John Martinis and John Clarke proved a remarkable concept: that the strange, modintuitive laws of quantum mechanics – phenomena previously believed to be limited to atoms and subatomic particles – could be revealed and controlled in a macroscopic electrical circuit on a chip. They created a superconducting electrical circuit (ie a circuit without electrical resistance) with a special feature known as a Josephson junction that can be used to create and manipulate these quantum phenomena.
The basis of superconducting quantum calculation
For Google’s Quantum AI team, this Nobel Prize is not just a celebration of historical science, it is a celebration of the basis for our current work with superconducting quantum calculation. Josephson -Cross forms the basis of today’s superconducting quantum bits (QUBITS), including those we make on Google Quantum AI. Michel and John’s work activated our progress so far, including the breakthrough’s Willow Quantum Chip, we announced last year, and our milestone in 2019 demonstrated that a quantum computer could complete a benchmark calculation that is impossible on a classic computer. It also controls our path forward as we progress on our hardware timetable and promote our mission to build quantum calculation for otherwise insoluble problems.
This award is an in -depth testimony of the recipient’s work and to the power of basic research. Ten years later, their discoveries continue to inspire us to build the next era with computing.