It had to be a prank.
At least that’s what physicist Michel H. Devoret first thought when he heard last week that he’d won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Devoret, the Frederick W. Beinecke Professor Emeritus of Applied Physics at Yale and professor of physics at the University of California-Santa Barbara, slept through the initial announcement last Tuesday morning (2:30 a.m. California time), as well as a pre-announcement call from the Nobel committee. He didn’t learn the news until he awoke several hours later.
“My phone was on silent mode,” he said. “I woke up at 7 and saw this traffic on my cell phone and on my computer and thought someone was playing a trick on me.”
He called his daughter, who lives in Devoret’s native France, and confirmed that the news was, indeed true. Then he spoke with the rest of his family, who were overjoyed.
“This was a happy surprise,” he said. “The Nobel Prize was completely outside of my mind.”
Devoret, along with John Clarke of the University of California-Berkeley and John M. Martinis of the University of California-Santa Barbara, won the prize for pioneering work they did in the 1980s which proved that quantum physics could be shown on a macroscopic, or visible, level, in a circuit. Devoret would go on to conduct some of the seminal design work on quantum superconducting circuits while working in the French national lab CEA Saclay in the late 1980s and ’90s. This led to the Cooper pair box and the quantronium, two of the first artificial atoms.
Devoret at work.
Devoret joined the Yale faculty in 2002. Along with Yale colleagues Robert Schoelkopf and Steven Girvin, he would produce groundbreaking research in circuit quantum electrodynamics (circuit QED), an approach to quantum computing that uses particles of microwave light in a superconducting microwave resonator.
“It is important, in commenting on this prize, to talk about my colleagues,” Devoret said. “This is about an entire field of research being honored. It’s about 40 years of work by students, post-docs, and fellow researchers.”
Devoret, who was also a founding member of the Yale Quantum Institute, was on Yale’s fulltime ladder faculty from 2002 until his retirement in mid-2024. He is now a professor emeritus and a research professor in the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science’s applied physics department. He is also chief scientist for Google at Quantum AI in Santa Barbara.
He plans to reunite with his Yale colleagues during a visit to campus later this semester.
In the meantime, he is still trying to adjust to a new level of attention. “My son told me something I had not fully processed, that the Nobel is more than a science prize. It makes you switch into a parallel universe tied to the popular culture.”
When asked how that makes him feel, Devoret laughed. “I feel like someone who has just won a Nobel Prize,” he said.
