STOCKHOLM -- Three scientists at American universities won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for research on subatomic quantum tunneling that lays the groundwork for better cellphones and faster computers and makes possible the kind of ultra-sensitive measurements achieved by MRI machines.

The work by John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis took the seeming contradictions of the subatomic world - where light can be both a wave and a particle, switches can be on and off at the same time and parts of atoms can tunnel through what seem like impenetrable barriers - and brought it to a more human scale. Their findings are just starting to appear in advanced technology and could pave the way for the development of supercharged computing.

This combination of images shows the win

See Full Page