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Michel H. Devoret
Photo: Harold Shapiro
Professor of Physics
2025 Nobel Prize in Physics
"For the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit"
Michel Devoret joined the faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 2024, when he also became chief scientist at Google Quantum AI. Prior to arriving in Santa Barbara, he spent 20 years as a professor of applied physics at Yale University, where he was a founding member of the Yale Quantum Institute. A leader in the development of quantum technologies, Devoret and colleagues at Yale designed the superconducting transmon qubit that today is used in quantum research around the world. Before Yale, he was director of research, head of the Quantronics Group at CEA-Saclay in France, from 1995-2002.
Devoret received his doctorate in condensed matter physics from University of Paris, Orsay, in 1982, then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, in John Clarke’s lab, where he, Clarke and John Martinis did the work that later earned them the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Royal Swedish Academy Press Release
UCSB News About the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics