John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for research on the weird world of sub-atomic quantum tunneling that advances the power of everyday digital communications and computing.

One of the winners said that quantum mechanics research already has wound up in our everyday communications.

Clarke, 83, conducted his research at the University of California, Berkeley; Martinis, 67, at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Devoret, 72, is at Yale and also at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Martinis’ wife, Jean, told Associated Press reporters who called at his home some two-and-a-half hours after the announcement that he was still asleep and did not yet know. She said in the past they had stayed up on the night of the physics award, but at some point they decided that sleep was more important.

AP reporters were later able to speak with Martinis, once his wife decided it was late enough to wake him up.

The prize winning research in the mid-1980s took the sub-atomic “weirdness of quantum mechanics” and found how those tiny interactions can have real world applications on the human scale level, said Jonathan Bagger, CEO of the American Physical Society. They have the potential to supercharge computing and communications.

The 100-year-old field of quantum mechanics deals with the seemingly impossible subatomic world where switches can be on-and-off at the same time and parts of atoms tunnel through what seems like impenetrable barriers.

The work is a crucial building block in the fast-developing world of quantum mechanics.

On Monday, Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries about how the immune system knows to attack germs and not our bodies.

Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics on Oct. 13.

The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of Alfred Nobel, the wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite who founded the prizes.

The prizes carry priceless prestige and a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million).