San Francisco: Google CEO Sundar Pichai congratulated physicists Michel Devoret, John Martinis, and John Clarke after the trio was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for their groundbreaking contributions to quantum mechanics.
In a post on X, Pichai wrote,
“Congrats to Michel Devoret, John Martinis, and John Clarke on the Nobel Prize in Physics. Michel is chief scientist of hardware at our Quantum AI lab and John Martinis led the hardware team for many years.”
Congrats to Michel Devoret, John Martinis, and John Clarke on the Nobel Prize in Physics. 🔬🥼 Michel is chief scientist of hardware at our Quantum AI lab and John Martinis led the hardware team for many years.
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) October 7, 2025
Their pioneering work in quantum mechanics in the 1980s made recent…
He further praised their decades-long research, noting that their pioneering work laid the foundation for Google’s quantum computing breakthroughs. “Their pioneering work in quantum mechanics in the 1980s made recent breakthroughs possible, and paved the way for error-corrected quantum computers to come,” he added.
Pichai also shared that he recently visited Google’s Quantum AI lab in Santa Barbara, where Devoret serves as chief scientist of hardware. “I was just at our quantum lab in Santa Barbara yesterday seeing the incredible progress, hope they are celebrating today. Feeling lucky this morning to work at a company that has had 5 Nobel Laureates among our ranks — 3 prizes in 2 years!”
About the Laureates
Michel Devoret, also a professor at Yale University, continues to drive Google’s efforts in building scalable and fault-tolerant quantum computers.
John Martinis, former Google researcher, led the team that achieved quantum supremacy in 2019 and later co-founded Qolab, a quantum computing startup, in 2022.
John Clarke contributed significantly to understanding macroscopic quantum phenomena in electrical circuits.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognised the trio “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.” Their experiments demonstrated that quantum properties could be made tangible in systems large enough to be held in hand. “Their superconducting electrical system could tunnel from one state to another, as if it were passing straight through a wall. They also showed that the system absorbed and emitted energy in doses of specific sizes, just as predicted by quantum mechanics,” the Academy noted.