Macroscopic quantum tunneling and the 2025 Physics Nobel prize

Norges tekniske vitenskapsakademi og TEKNA inviterer til åpent møte onsdag 11. februar 2026 kl. 19:00 på Jernaldergården besøkssenter, Madlamarkveien 152.

Prof. Aleksi Kurkela, UiS:

Macroscopic quantum tunneling and the 2025 Physics Nobel prize

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, John M. Martinis.

Abstract

In the microscopic world of quantum mechanics, reality follows strange rules: particles can be in two places at once, tunnel through seemingly impenetrable barriers, and occupy only discrete energy states.

Yet in everyday life, energies appear continuous, and Schrödinger’s cat is never both dead and alive—the world looks stubbornly classical. So where does the quantum weirdness go as systems get bigger?
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics recognized experiments showing that quantum behaviour can persist at macroscopic scales.

By observing quantum tunneling in superconducting circuits, these experiments revealed that large, human-made devices can behave as single quantum objects—laying the foundation for modern quantum computers.

Aleksi Kurkela has been a professor at the University of Stavanger (UiS) since 2015. He was a senior scientist at CERN from 2013 to 2020, following postdoctoral positions at ETH Zürich and McGill University. He earned his PhD from the University of Helsinki. His research focuses on quantum field theory, with applications to particle colliders and nuclear physics.

Møtet er gratis og åpent for alle interesserte. Det serveres kaffe, te og lapper før og etter presentasjonen.