Michel Devoret
active c. 1953, Paris, France
French-American physicist, architect of 'single-electron quantum electronics' and the transmon superconducting qubit.
Devoret took his Paris PhD then postdoc'd with Clarke at Berkeley, where the three demonstrated macroscopic quantum behavior of Josephson circuits. He developed the 'single-electron pump', engineered superconducting circuits as 'artificial atoms' (the Quantronics group at Saclay), then at Yale created circuit QED — weak measurement/undoing of quantum jumps — and the transmon qubit now underpinning industrial quantum computers.
Nobel-winning work
The Nobel contribution: the 1984–85 demonstration that the Josephson phase in a current-biased circuit has quantized energy levels and tunnels macroscopically (with Clarke, Martinis). Devoret then 'civilized' quantum circuits: the transmon (2007) reduced charge-noise sensitivity, and circuit QED lets qubits be measured without destroying their state — the architecture adopted by Google and IBM.
Workplaces: Yale University, Google Quantum AI
France, United States