Having an “Aha Moment” Every Day Beside a Future Nobel Laureate

“It was a great experience to work with Michel Devoret back in the day — during every discussion you’d have at least one motivating ‘aha moment,’” said Attila Geresdi, group leader at Finnish company IQM, in an interview with bme.hu. He had once collaborated on a joint research project with Mr Devoret, who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Devoret, along with John Clarke and John M. Martinis, received the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the macroscopic quantum tunneling effect and the quantization of energy in electric circuits. The three scientists created a superconducting circuit and observed quantum mechanical effects within it, demonstrating that quantum phenomena are not confined to atomic systems — quantized energy levels can also appear in larger-scale structures.

Michel Devoret

“The essence of the tunnelling effect is that under certain conditions, electrons can pass through an insulating layer between two metal plates”, explained Péter Makk, associate professor and head of the Department of Physics at BME. “In the system studied by the new Nobel Laureates, superconducting metals were placed on either side of the insulator. This configuration creates what is known as a Josephson junction, across which electron pairs can tunnel without generating a voltage drop. Their experiment demonstrated that by irradiating the circuit with a precisely defined frequency, it is possible to induce excitations between quantised energy levels – and the appearance of voltage across the junction indicates that this has occurred,” he added.

Attila Geresdi graduated from the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the BME in 2011, specializing in quantum technology. During his postdoctoral research in the Netherlands, he began collaborating with Michel Devoret’s group, which at the time was based at Yale University in the United States.

“Our joint research, which lasted four years and resulted in several publications, focused on a superconducting circuit–based qubit, so in this sense it was closely related to the discoveries from the 1980s that have now been recognized with the Nobel Prize,” 

Mr Geresdi recalled. “The experiments were conducted in their lab, while we at the Technology University of Delft worked mainly on sample preparation and data interpretation.”

Since then, the BME alumnus has remained active in the field of quantum computing. His current employer, IQM, is one of the leading European companies developing quantum computers. “My job now is applied research — in short, to integrate as many qubits as possible into a single quantum processor,” he said.

BME itself is not only a training ground for physicists who go on to work at Europe’s top quantum technology companies, but also a leading institution in quantum research. Under the leadership of Péter Makk, the Faculty of Natural Sciences operates a low-temperature solid-state physics laboratory, where experiments are conducted under unique conditions unmatched elsewhere in Hungary.

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