John Martinis

which is a little bit hard to describe here, but you can see tunneling.

But I think the little bit easier thing may be easier is to look at the energy levels of this.

And let me kind of explain that when people discovered, you know, atomic physics and started doing any doing this.

They excited a gas of, you know, some gas and the light coming out of that gas would be at certain colors of frequency.

So if you go outside and you have the sodium lamps on, these are kind of the yellow lamps.

You have, you know, kind of a single frequency coming out of that lamp.

Or nowadays you look at LEDs.

There are certain frequencies that come out of that.

And.

This is a quantum mechanical effect that see how the electrons travel around the atom.

There's only certain kind of frequencies that they oscillate at.

Now, classically, you would expect there to be all different frequencies that spirals around or spirals into the nucleus.

So that's what you expect.

But we saw these discrete frequencies.

Yeah, 85 or, I actually forget, but 85 or 86.

This was a big question and people wanted to, you know, understand that.

And, you know, we published it in physical review letters and it got a lot of attention.

And I think we had a little article in Scientific American that was very proud of that wrote about that.

And yeah, it was, you know, it was kind of a kind of a big deal.

Yeah, so, you know, it was an important piece of work and people noticed it.