John Clarke, UC Berkeley emeritus professor, awarded 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics

John Clarke, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum tunneling, one of many strange aspects of quantum mechanics.

Clarke shared the prize with two other physicists, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis, who at the time of their prize-winning research were at UC Berkeley. Devoret is now at Yale University and UC Santa Barbara, while Martinis is at UC Santa Barbara.

The Nobel Prize committee honored the three “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit.” The discovery laid the foundation for superconducting quantum bits, or qubits, at the heart of many of today’s quantum computers.

Clarke, 83, is the 27th UC Berkeley faculty member to win a Nobel Prize and the fourth winner in the past five years. In 2021, David Card shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, while in 2020, Jennifer Doudna shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Reinhard Genzel shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.