Submitted by Prof. Friedrich... on Tue, 07/10/2025 - 12:21
A happy announcement just came through: Cavendish alumnus John Clarke has won this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for work in superconductivity, jointly with Michel Devoret and John Martinis.
John did his PhD work at the Cavendish, supervised by Brian Pippard, in the Low Temperature Physics group, the precursor to QM. His legacy to the Cavendish museum is the 'SLUG', the Superconducting Low-inductance Undulating Galvanometer, which looks like a large blob of solder with two wires sticking through it. Motivated by Brian Josephson's theoretical work (also in the same group), Brian Pippard had proposed to John Clarke to work towards exploiting the Josephson effect to build a super-sensitive voltmeter. The idea worked, and eventually this line of thinking led to the development of SQUIDs (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices) and more.
Congratulations to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis on this tremendous achievement and highly deserved honour!