1st February - The science behind the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics

Topic: The science behind the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics: How experiments on a chip revealed quantum physics acting on a macroscopic scale

Description: The 2025 Physics Nobel Prize was awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis — three experimentalists who demonstrated quantum behaviour in an electric circuit. The prize recognises the important achievement of taking quantum phenomena out of the realm of atoms and elementary particles into the macroscopic world, which enabled current progress in quantum computing and quantum information as part of the second quantum revolution. In this seminar, I will discuss in a broadly accessible way the basics of macroscopic quantum tunnelling, how it was observed by the Nobel laureates, and why this observation eventually enabled the design of working quantum bits (“qubits”).

Speaker: Uli Zuelicke is a professor of physics at the School of Chemical and Physical Science, Victoria University of Wellington. He researches macroscopic quantum phenomena in superconductors and magnets and recently developed a course focused on practical quantum computation.