Google’s quantum computer makes a big technical leap

Michel H Devoret was one of three physicists who won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for a series of experiments they conducted more than four decades ago.

As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1980s, Devoret helped show that the strange and powerful properties of quantum mechanics — the physics of the subatomic realm — could also be observed in electrical circuits large enough to be seen with the naked eye.