This has ramifications for future breakthroughs: “John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments revealing macroscopic quantum tunneling and energy quantization in superconducting circuits, laying the groundwork for quantum computers and sensors.”
Gizmodo has a great article on this:
On the centennial of modern quantum mechanics, the Nobel Committee awarded the year’s most prestigious physics prize to an experiment that demonstrated how quantum effects play out on large scales—including inside your smartphone.
Imagine throwing a tennis ball against a wall. Millennia of both scientific and anecdotal observations teach that the ball will likely hit the wall and bounce back. In the quantum world, however, that isn’t always the case. There, the ball might pass straight through the wall and appear on the other side—a phenomenon referred to as “tunneling.”
