Michel Devoret

Origins and early life

Michel Henri Devoret was born in Paris on 5 March 1953 and trained first as an engineer, graduating from the École nationale supérieure des télécommunications in 1975 before turning to physics at the University of Orsay. In an oral history interview recorded in 2021, he said that his parents were of Jewish background, even though they were not religious. He took his doctorate in 1982 for research at the Saclay centre of the French Atomic Energy Commission, then spent two years, from 1982 to 1984, as a postdoctoral researcher in John Clarke's laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Work and career

There, in 1984 and 1985, with Clarke and John Martinis, then a graduate student, he built a circuit of superconductors separated by a thin insulating layer and showed that this system, big enough to be held in the hand, tunnels through a barrier and absorbs or emits energy only in fixed amounts. Back in France he founded the Quantronics group at Saclay with Daniel Esteve and Cristian Urbina, which invented an electron pump, observed the charge of Cooper pairs directly and built a superconducting quantum bit, the quantronium.

He joined Yale University in 2002, where with Robert Schoelkopf and Steven Girvin he helped develop the transmon, a superconducting qubit now widely used, and in 2009 he pioneered the fluxonium; from 2007 he also held the chair of mesoscopic physics at the Collège de France. In 2023 he became chief scientist for quantum hardware at Google Quantum AI, and in 2024 he moved from Yale to a professorship at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Recognition

In 2025 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with John Clarke and John Martinis, “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit”, work that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said opens the way to quantum computers, cryptography and sensors.