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University of California’s Martinis to discuss qubit scaling

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October 25, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

The lecture, titled “From prehistoric qubits to building a useful quantum computer,” will be held at the York Theatre, Seymour Centre, and is open to all who register. Martinis will reflect on his Nobel Prize-winning work on macroscopic quantum tunnelling and energy-level quantisation, and explore the remaining hurdles to scalable quantum systems.

Martinis’ Nobel Prize Recognizes Macroscopic Quantum Behaviour in Circuits

Professor John M. Martinis’ 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics acknowledged the demonstration of macroscopic quantum behaviour within electrical circuits, a feat previously thought limited to atomic and subatomic scales. The award, shared with John Clarke and Michel Devoret, recognised their work enabling the development of superconducting quantum computers, York Theatre says. Martinis’ research revealed that quantum phenomena, such as tunnelling, could be observed in circuits large enough to manipulate and control, fundamentally shifting how quantum computing possibilities were understood.

This lecture will also explore the key advances that established superconducting qubits as a leading platform for building quantum computers, a technology now attracting significant global investment. Despite progress, substantial hurdles remain before large-scale quantum computers become practical. Professor Martinis plans to address the ongoing challenges in hardware fabrication, computer architecture and algorithm development.

He will discuss how adapting established semiconductor technologies and systems engineering approaches could unlock improved qubits and scalable quantum systems. Martinis’ career trajectory reflects this evolution; after years at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he held the Susan and Bruce Worster Chair in Experimental Physics, he joined Google Quantum AI in 2014. There, his team built a 53-qubit entangled system that successfully solved a problem intractable for classical computers.

Following his departure from Google in 2020, Martinis expanded his work to Australia, joining Silicon Quantum Computing and later co-founding Qolab, where he currently serves as Chief Technology Officer. The event will be hosted by Petra Andrén, CEO of Quantum Australia, with an introduction from Professor David Reilly of The University of Sydney and CEO of Emergence Quantum.

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Avatar of Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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