Quantum Tunneling Goes Big: The Tiny Circuit Experiment That Won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics
Quantum Tunneling, Explained At the heart of this Nobel-winning discovery is a phenomenon straight out of quantum theory: quantum tunneling. In classical physics, if you throw a ball at a solid wall, it will always bounce back – it doesn’t have enough energy to break through. By analogy, an electron trapped in a low-energy state cannot classically overcome a higher-energy barrier. But quantum mechanics allows for a spooky exception: the particle can sometimes “tunnel” through the barrier and appear on the other side, as if by ghostly permission of probability nobelprize.org nobelprize.org. This is a well-known microscopic effect – it
