John Martinis

We started this project a couple of years into grad school.

I forget exact date.

And what was interesting is this was a question that was actually posed by Professor Anthony Leggett, who won the Nobel Prize for, you know, helium three, you know, physics in, I think, 2003.

Was that superfluid work?

Superfluid helium-3.

Yeah, that's right.

Well, it has this superfluid behavior, but it has a very complicated behavior because of the more complicated nuclei of the helium-3.

And this had been discovered and people worked for a while to figure that out.

And he helped develop the theory for that.

So he was quite well-known, very, very smart person.

And although he won the Nobel Prize for that, okay, there's not much helium-3 physics going on.

But for the question that led to our experiment, okay, there's a huge field.

And the question was, do macroscopic objects behave quantum mechanically?

Okay, and this is a macroscopic object, might be a small ball.

In our case, it's an electrical circuit with billions of electrons in it, billions of atom.

And is the collective motion of, say, the ball, quantum mechanical?

Now, you know, if you think about throwing a ball against the wall, it's going to bounce off.

But if you make the wall thin enough and the ball light enough, it'll then every once in a while tunnel through because of the laws of quantum mechanics.

Hold on.

Let's just pause on that for a second.