Googler Michel Devoret Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (blog.google)

Google’s Chief Scientist of Quantum Hardware, Michel Devoret, has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing the honor with John Martinis (a Google alumnus) and John Clarke (UC Berkeley). The prize recognizes their pioneering 1980s experiments that demonstrated quantum mechanics operating at macroscopic scales in electrical circuits — a milestone showing that quantum phenomena can be produced, measured and controlled in engineered devices rather than only in atoms or subatomic particles. The announcement also underscores Google’s growing connection to Nobel-winning foundational work, joining previous laureates from the company and its alumni. Technically, Devoret, Martinis and Clarke used superconducting circuits with Josephson junctions to create quantized energy levels and coherent quantum behavior on a chip; those junctions remain the core element of today’s superconducting qubits. Their methods laid the experimental and conceptual groundwork for superconducting quantum computing and directly enabled milestones such as Google’s 2019 quantum benchmark and last year’s Willow chip. For the AI/ML and quantum communities, the prize reaffirms the long‑term value of fundamental physics for scalable quantum hardware and signals continued momentum for qubit development, error mitigation strategies, and hardware roadmaps aimed at solving classically intractable problems.