In the course
Keep watching
10 videos · 4 h 6 min
Lecture · Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize · John Clarke · 2025
"From SLUGs to macroscopic quantum phenomena": John Clarke on the 1984–85 Berkeley experiments in which an entire superconducting circuit, big enough to hold in your hand, tunnelled out of a trapped state as a single quantum object.
Lecture · Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize · Michel H. Devoret · 2025
"From macroscopic quantum phenomena to artificial atoms": Michel Devoret on how a circuit's quantized energy levels — measured in the same experiments — became the foundation of today's superconducting qubits.
Lecture · Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize · John M. Martinis · 2025
"Prehistoric Superconducting Qubits": John Martinis, who later led Google's quantum-hardware team, traces the line from the 1980s tunnelling experiments to the superconducting qubit.
Explainer · YouTube
Up and Atom
A friendly ten-minute tour that builds tunnelling from light: an evanescent wave leaks a short way past a surface that totally reflects light, and an electron's wavefunction fades into a barrier in the same way, leaving a small chance of finding it on the far side. As you watch, ask what would happen to that chance if the barrier were twice as thick.
Lecture · YouTube
Physics Explained
A forty-minute deep dive that starts from the alpha-decay paradox Rutherford faced, matches the wavefunction and its slope at the barrier edges to reach an explicit tunnelling probability, then approximates the real Coulomb barrier to estimate half-lives. Watch it after Parts 2 and 3, with our transmission formulas and the worksheet's Gamow challenge beside you.
Explainer · YouTube
Sixty Symbols
Physicists from the University of Nottingham unpack the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded for macroscopic quantum tunnelling and energy quantisation in a superconducting circuit. Watch it after Part 6 to see how an entire circuit can tunnel.
Lecture · Stanford
David Miller Quantum Mechanics Courses · David A. B. Miller
Stanford's David Miller shows why ψ and dψ/dz must both be continuous, then sends a wave at an infinitely thick barrier: inside, ψ falls off as e^(−κz) instead of stopping dead, and the barrier still reflects 100% but with a phase shift that has no classical analogue. His worked example is section 1's own: an electron of 1 eV meeting a 2 eV barrier, giving an amplitude decay length 1/κ of about 0.2 nm and a probability decay length of about 0.1 nm.
Explainer · YouTube
Professor Dave Explains
The full barrier calculation behind section 2's formula, worked step by step: reflection and transmission coefficients (from 2:54), the transmission factor T (5:33), hyperbolic sines and cosines (10:29) and an application (18:48). Once 2κL is large, the exact result shrinks to the lesson's T ≈ 16(E/V)(1 − E/V)e^(−2κL); plug in E = 1 eV, V = 2 eV and L = 0.5 nm and check that you get about 2.4%.
Lecture · Stanford
David Miller Quantum Mechanics Courses · David A. B. Miller
Miller slices a smoothly varying barrier into thin layers whose internal boundary matrices become the identity, leaving an amplitude factor exp(−∫κ(z)dz), with κ = √(2m(V(z) − E))/ħ, and a tunnelling probability, his "penetration factor", of an edge-dependent prefactor times exp(−2∫κ(z)dz). That is section 2's WKB rule (twice the area under κ in the exponent) and the engine of Gamow's calculation in section 3; it builds on his transfer-matrix lecture (33c), so treat it as a stretch goal.
Explainer · YouTube
FloatHeadPhysics
A story-driven tour of section 3's puzzle, with chapters running from "The alpha decay paradox" (2:30) through how quantum mechanics solves it (9:44) with tunnelling (11:36), where half-lives come from (12:50) and why not every heavy isotope alpha-decays (14:43), then a look ahead to section 4 ("The sun is too cold to be alive", 19:12). Keep the Geiger–Nuttall numbers beside you: a factor of two in alpha energy, a factor of about 5×10²³ in lifetime.