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10 videos · 5 h 53 min
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.
Series · Perimeter
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics · Katie Mack · 2023
Ten five-minute episodes hosted by the cosmologist Katie Mack: duality, quantization, uncertainty, superposition, entanglement, probability, tunnelling and quantum computing. The friendliest possible on-ramp, and a quick refresher before any chapter.
Interview · Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize · Heinrich Rohrer
Heinrich Rohrer, who built the scanning tunnelling microscope with Gerd Binnig at IBM Zurich, interviewed by Adam Smith at the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm in April 2008. It starts here on the microscope itself and its first surprises (2:25); later chapters cover the partnership with Binnig (18:15), the opposition they met (22:05), the prize (24:45) and the nanoscience revolution that followed (26:05).
Lecture · Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize · Serge Haroche & David J. Wineland · 2012
Serge Haroche on trapping photons in a box to watch the quantum-to-classical boundary — decoherence — in action, then David Wineland on superposition and entanglement with trapped ions. The experiments that turned thought experiments into laboratory routine.
Lecture · Perimeter
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics · Shohini Ghose · 2020
Physicist Shohini Ghose of Wilfrid Laurier University surveys the quantum technologies that grow out of superposition and entanglement, from quantum computers to secure communication. A clear public lecture given at Perimeter Institute in March 2020.
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.