Decoding the Physics Nobel Prize for quantum research

A century-old branch of physics, quantum mechanics, explains phenomena that remain mysterious under classical mechanics. Among its counterintuitive predictions is tunnelling—a process that allows a particle to pass straight through an energy barrier that it classically should not cross.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three American physicists—John Clarke of the University of California, Berkeley, Michel H. Devoret of Yale University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, and John M. Martinis of the University of California, Santa Barbara—for their pioneering experiments in the mid-1980s that revealed macroscopic quantum tunnelling and quantised energy levels in a system large enough to be visible to the naked eye.

When these experiments were conducted in