More than deserved!
Both Devoret and Martinis are also highly involved in pushing quantum engineering to new levels - Devoret at Google Quantum AI and Martinis (formerly at Google) with his company, Qolab.
Coincidentally, I have a close friend doing his PhD with Devoret and know someone working with Martinis. I am curious to see if they will ever see their respective supervisors again, given that the Nobel Prize attention will likely garner them countless invitations for talks and keynotes...
Fred Ramsdell was among those honored Monday with a 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine, but he's currently "living his best life" on an "off the grid" hiking foray https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251006-unreachable-n...
For those looking for a good pop-sci introduction to these sort of quantum effects and why demonstrating macroscopic quantum effects is a big deal for the foundations of the field I recommend “Through Two Doors at Once” by Anil Ananthaswany.
Is this inferring to the double slit experiment?
Yes
Great to see the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Cambridge, UK continuing to add to their already outstanding number of Nobel laureate alumni.
The Paris-Sud University was a new name to me. Apparently, this will be the 4th Nobel laureate associated with the university.
I remember being introduced to this research when reading a weird paper on the unexpected efficiency of photosynthesis, but now I can't find that paper. Anyone got any hints?
Maybe you can find the paper you ate looking for starting here? https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2025/07/08/how-plants-manage-ligh...
Tip: this page links to further reading of older stuff.
For the papers about their measurements, you can look at the references in the technical press release https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2025/10/advanced-physicsp...
Can't help you with "a weird paper on the unexpected efficiency of photosynthesis", try asking a biologist at your local university, or possibly an organic chemist.
Yeah, I looked at Google Scholar to try and find cross-references to anything to do with photosynthesis and came up empty-handed. Annoying because I've been telling people about these guys for years, but can't find the original paper that introduced me to them!
why annoy credible scientists when there is an AI underlord available. Unexpected Quantum Efficiency of Photosynthesis: cite papers -->perplexity.ai
hints galore.
This award involved some clever engineering to set up quantum effects in a macroscopic system, but was there any new physics involved here?
(Still better than last year's award which wasn't really physics at all!)
From that viewpoint of all of chemistry and biology is just a consequence of theoretical physics. A lot of the 'consequences' of physics are very surprising and not at all obvious from the fundamental equations. There's a great paper you might want to read:
https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_differen...
He also won a Nobel by the way.
Many great discoveries follow from new instrumentation leading to better and novel data, and less often some conceptual leap. This is why the genius of Einstein is all the more remarkable in coming up with relativity. Interestingly, he got his Nobel for something else :)
They discovered that the theory worked in a regime it hadn't been tested before; I'm not sure what "new physics" means in your sentence: it is a core assumption of physics that it's rules are always true, that all physics has always existed.
New physics in this context means previously unknown effects or mechanisms, or even a new theory/framework for an already understood phenomenon. Using "physics" in this way is common amongst academics.
It's highly non-trivial claim that macroscopic system can have quantized energy levels and exhibit measurable quantum effects. You can't just solve Shroedinger equation of 10^24 particles to show that.
Comments like these make me realize most people have no clue what science is really like.
I don't think so, I just think they expect that Nobel Prize level physics should feel less incremental, and everything that doesn't involve a revolution in physics (like supersymmetry) or at least an expected confirmation of an old revolution (like the Higgs boson or gravitational waves) feels incremental.
Great experiments are an essential part of physics.
Exactly, also in it's goal to "demonstrate quantum tunneling macroscopically" haven't we had tunneling diodes for quite a while? The device uses tunneling for its basic functionality
Michel H. Devoret, Chief Scientist at Google Quantum AI, and in April 2020 John M. Martinis resigned from Google after being reassigned to an advisory role. [0]
Sounds like there was some politics shenanigans between them where Martinis was moved into a useless role and took the hint at the height of covid lockdown.
You linked the wrong article