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Michel Devoret
French physicist (born 1953) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Michel Henri Devoret[3] (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl dəvɔʁɛ]; born 1953) is a French physicist. He is Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara,[4][5] and Professor Emeritus of Applied Physics at Yale University.[6] He holds the title of Chief Scientist of Quantum Hardware at Google Quantum AI.[7] He is known for the development of various superconducting quantum computing architectures, including the quantronium, the transmon, and the fluxonium.
He shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Clarke and John M. Martinis for their joint work on macroscopic quantum phenomena in superconducting circuits.[8]
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Early life and education
Devoret was born in Paris, France, in 1953.[9][10]
Devoret graduated as a telecommunications engineer from École nationale supérieure des télécommunications (ENST, now known as Télécom Paris) in Paris in 1975.[11][9] He obtained a graduate diploma (DEA) in quantum optics from the University of Orsay (present-day Paris-Saclay University), followed by a doctorate in condensed matter physics in 1982.[9][11] He performed his doctoral research at CEA Saclay in the group of Anatole Abragam,[12][13] under the supervision of Neil S. Sullivan.[13]
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Career
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Devoret worked as a postdoctoral researcher in John Clarke's group at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1982 to 1984.[9] Together, with John M. Martinis, a graduate student at the time, they demonstrated for the first time the mesoscopic quantum levels of a Josephson junction in 1985.[9][14]
Devoret then returned to France and founded the Quantronics group at the Orme des Merisiers laboratory of CEA Saclay together with Daniel Esteve and Cristian Urbina. The group measured the traversal time of tunnelling, invented an electron pump, observed the charge of Cooper pairs directly, and developed a type of qubit dubbed quantronium. They also observed the Ramsey fringes of quantronium.[9][15][16]
Devoret became a professor at Yale University in 2002. In Yale, Steven Girvin, Robert J. Schoelkopf and Devoret devised a type of superconducting charge qubit called the transmon.[17][18] In 2009, Devoret also pioneered fluxonium[19], which can be understood as a special type of flux qubit. In 2010, he also developed a microwave quantum limited amplifier for qubit readout and sensing.[20][21]
He was appointed to the Collège de France in 2007 and resigned in 2013.[9][15]
In 2023, he became the Chief Scientist for Hardware at Google Quantum AI.[7] He was appointed, in 2024, Professor of Physics at University of California, Santa Barbara.[4]
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Honors and awards
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Devoret was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003,[3] of the French Academy of Sciences in 2007[22] and of the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.[23]
Devoret and Esteve were awarded the Ampère Prize by the French Academy of Science in 1991.[24] In 1995, Devoret received the Descartes-Huygens Prize from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science.[25] Devoret, Esteve, Yasunobu Nakamura and Johan Mooj were awarded the Europhysics-Agilent Prize by the European Physical Society in 2004.[26] In 2013, Devoret and Schoelkopf were awarded with the John Stewart Bell Prize for "Fundamental and pioneering experimental advances in entangling superconducting qubits and microwave photons, and their application to quantum information processing."[27]
In 2014, Devoret shared the Fritz London Memorial Prize with Martinis and Schoelkopf.[28] Tthe Micius Quantum Prize was jointly awarded in 2021 to Devoret, Clarke and Nakamura.[29] In 2016, Devoret was awarded the Olli V. Lounasmaa Memorial Prize.[11]
The 2024 Comstock Prize in Physics was awarded to Devoret and Schoelkopf.[30] In 2025 Devoret, Clarke and Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their joint discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.[8]
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