Reacción a "Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis for their experiments with a chip that revealed quantum physics in action"

John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis are three of the researchers who have contributed most to the field of quantum physics in superconducting electrical circuits. Their work in the 1980s demonstrated that a superconductor behaves like a single, macroscopic quantum system, meaning that even though it has a huge number of electrons, they all act in unison; in fact, it is considered to be a condensate with an electric charge. Their results showed that the circuits do indeed exhibit macroscopic quantum behaviour observable as voltages and currents, and that they display quantised energy levels, as if they were artificial atoms designed in a laboratory.

All the experiments they carried out took advantage of the physics of the Josephson effect, in which two superconductors are placed almost in contact, with a small barrier between them of microscopic dimensions, but which still allows the superconducting current to cross from one side to the other due to the tunnel effect. This element, now called the Josephson junction, is the equivalent of the transistor in modern processors for the construction of superconducting quantum computers. In fact, the experiments for which this Nobel Prize was awarded represented a primitive version of what we now call a quantum bit, or qubit, which is the basic element that makes up quantum computers.