Three scientists at US universities win Nobel Prize in physics for advancing quantum technology

STOCKHOLM AP Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for research on the strange behavior of subatomic particles called quantum tunneling that enabled the ultra-sensitive measurements achieved by MRI machines and laid the groundwork for better cellphones and faster computers The work by John Clarke Michel H Devoret and John M Martinis who work at American universities took the seeming contradictions of the subatomic world where light can be both a wave and a particle and parts of atoms can tunnel through seemingly impenetrable walls and applied them in the more traditional physics of digital devices The results of their findings are just starting to appear in advanced system and could pave the way for the improvement of supercharged computing The prizewinning research in the mid- s took the subatomic weirdness of quantum mechanics and unveiled how those tiny interactions can have real-world applications declared Jonathan Bagger CEO of the American Physical Society The experiments were a crucial building block in the fast-developing world of quantum mechanics Speaking from his cellphone Clarke who spearheaded the research squad reported One of the underlying reasons that cellphones work is because of all this work When quantum mechanics first came to light in a prominent physicist sought to illustrate its several paradoxes with the example of a cat in a box that was both alive and dead at the same time The three Nobel winners displayed that science can put such principles to work revealed Physics This day Editor-in-Chief Richard Fitzgerald who was in a competing research group in the s They didn t take it that far but they exhibited that it can be done Fitzgerald stated The winning physicists took the scale of something that we can t see we can t touch we can t feel and brought it up to the scale of something recognizable and made it something you can build upon Fitzgerald mentioned Clarke conducted his research at the University of California Berkeley Martinis worked at the University of California Santa Barbara Devoret is at Yale and also at the University of California Santa Barbara How the winners reacted Martinis wife Jean narrated Associated Press reporters who called at his home hours after the announcement that he was still asleep and did not yet know In the past she explained they stayed up on the night of the physics award but at specific point they decided that sleep was more significant When his wife woke him and informed him about the journalists seeking an interview the new Nobel laureate remembered that the prizes were being reported this week He opened his computer looked at the announcement and saw his picture along with the other winners So I was kind of in shock he disclosed Clarke noted it never occurred to him that he would win a Nobel Prize I practically collapsed Clarke recounted AP I was perfectly stunned I mean it s something that I had never ever dreamed of in my entire life Why the work matters Martinis who was a senior Google scientist working toward quantum computing before co-founding his own company Qolab noted the big future goal is quantum computing which would be a giant leap in speed and sophistication by relying on the power of the contradictory states in that subatomic world That is still eight to years away But he stated the company s experiments presented a computer could be much much more powerful Devoret is now chief scientist for Google s quantum computing efforts Quantum computers are one very sort of obvious use but the research could also help develop sensors that detect and measure faint phenomena such as magnetic fields and advance cryptography to encode information stated Mark Pearce a professor of astrophysics and Nobel physics committee member And through better understanding of precision chemistry it could develop better materials for daily living and even give an added boost to artificial intelligence Martinis announced Before the work at Berkeley scientists knew single electrons or pairs of tiny electrons could tunnel through an impenetrable barrier What Clarke announced his group learned was if you design the circuity properly you could truly have tunneling of objects larger and more useful than just a couple of electrons That discovery can be used to make very sophisticated things that would not otherwise be able to work out Clarke explained at a news conference mentioning his iPhone and quantum computers He also criticized the Trump administration for its deep cuts to science funding saying they would cripple science If this continues it may take a decade to get back to where we were half a year ago Clarke stated Martinis Bagger and Fitzgerald stated it s a bit of a stretch to say cellphones now use the breakthrough made by Clarke and colleagues But ultra-sensitive measuring devices rely on the organization s work including MRI machines which would be far less useful without their advances Bagger stated Quantum mechanics is everywhere in everything we do from the cellphone to the satellite communications that are connected to the cellphones to the screens on which we watch our videos on our cellphones Bagger explained Nobel history and other prizes Tuesday s award was the th time the prize has been given Last year artificial intelligence pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the physics prize for helping create the building blocks of machine learning On Monday Mary E Brunkow Fred Ramsdell and Dr Shimon Sakaguchi won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries about how the immune system knows to attack germs and not our bodies Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday The Nobel Peace Prize will be released Friday followed by the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics on Monday The award ceremony will be held Dec the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel the wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite who founded the prizes The prizes carry priceless prestige and a cash award of million Swedish kronor nearly million Corder announced from The Hague Netherlands and Borenstein from Washington Associated Press journalist Adithi Ramakrishnan in New York contributed to this assessment Source