One Circuit, Many Cities: The Mobile Careers Behind the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics

On 7 October 2025, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis, each taking a one-third portion of the same prize for a single line of reasoning: the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit. One citation, three names — and, in the accompanying records, a spread of cities that reaches from Cambridge and Paris to Berkeley, New Haven, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. For a publication interested in how working lives move between places, that geography is the story. The physics was not produced by one building; it sits at the end of careers that crossed borders, institutions and the line between university and company laboratory.

One citation, three laureates

The prize record is unusually tidy. It carries a single date, 7 October 2025, a single motivation, and an identical one-third share for each laureate. Clarke, Devoret and Martinis are all listed against the same wording: the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit. An equal split is a formal statement rather than a measurement of who contributed what, but it does tell readers that the committee treated the result as genuinely shared rather than as one person's finding with supporting cast.

The phrase itself is worth unpacking gently. Quantum tunnelling and discrete energy levels are usually discussed at the scale of individual particles. The recognised work concerns those behaviours appearing in an electric circuit — an object built on a workbench, wired and measured like any other piece of laboratory hardware. That shift in scale is the reason superconducting circuits later became a practical platform for quantum research, though the citation covers the underlying discovery rather than any particular machine built on top of it.

Starting points: Cambridge, Paris and a generation apart

The three did not begin in the same place or the same decade. John Clarke was born in 1942 in Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. Michel H. Devoret was born in 1953 in Paris. John M. Martinis was born in 1958; the structured prize records list his birth year without the same place detail. Sixteen years separate the oldest and youngest laureate — close to a generation in academic terms, which usually means different training environments, different funding climates and different assumptions about what a physics career looks like.

Two of the three began life in old European university cities and are recognised at American institutions. That pattern is familiar to anyone who follows scientific migration: research problems tend to gather people from elsewhere, and a national origin often says less about a career than the sequence of laboratories that followed it.

The map of affiliations, from Berkeley to Santa Barbara

The affiliations recorded alongside the prize form a short route along and across the United States. Clarke is listed with the University of California in Berkeley. Martinis is listed with the University of California in Santa Barbara. Devoret appears with Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and also with the University of California in Santa Barbara — a single laureate holding ties on both coasts.

Read together, the entries point to two gravitational centres. Northern California and Santa Barbara account for most of the listed positions, while New Haven anchors the eastern end. Santa Barbara in particular appears twice, under two different names, which is the clearest sign in the record that this was not three parallel careers in three isolated places.

When university labs meet company labs

The listed affiliations also cross the boundary between academia and industry. Martinis is recorded with Qolab, based in Los Angeles, alongside his university position. Devoret is recorded with Google Quantum AI in Santa Barbara, alongside Yale and the University of California. For a prize that honours foundational physics, that is a notable mix: the recognised researchers are attached to company laboratories as well as departments.

It reflects how superconducting-circuit research is now resourced. Fabrication facilities, cryogenic equipment and engineering teams are expensive, and corporate laboratories have become one of the places where that infrastructure sits. The records do not describe what any of these roles involve day to day, and nothing here should be read as a claim about commercial hardware or its performance. What they do show is that a modern physics address book can include a campus and a company at once.

What the records do not tell us

An affiliation list is a snapshot, not a biography. It gives the institutions attached to a laureate at the moment of recognition, not the year anyone moved, the order of appointments, or how long each post lasted. Devoret's dual listing across New Haven and Santa Barbara marks a relationship between two places without dating it, and Martinis's university and company entries sit side by side without any indication of sequence.

Nor does the record describe how the three worked in relation to one another — whether through shared benches, overlapping groups or independent lines of inquiry that converged. Those questions belong to interviews and archives rather than to a prize entry. What the prize does establish, plainly, is that one sentence about a quantum effect in an electric circuit now carries three names and at least six cities behind it, which is a reasonable working description of how contemporary research actually gets made.

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