Amnon Aharony

Amnon Aharony (; born 7 January 1943) is an Israeli Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, Israel and in the Physics Department of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. After years of research on statistical physics (critical phenomena, random systems, fractals, percolation), his current research focuses on condensed matter theory, especially in mesoscopic physics and spintronics. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of several other academies. He also received several prizes, including the Rothschild Prize in Physical Sciences, and the Gunnar Randers Research Prize, awarded every other year by the King of Norway.

Early life and education Amnon Aharony was born in Jerusalem, and grew up in Netanya, Israel. He received his B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics in 1964 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His M.Sc. thesis, under the supervision of Gideon Rakavy, was on the distorted wave Born approximation for direct nuclear reactions (1965), from the same university. He received his doctorate in 1972 from Tel Aviv University, under the supervision of Yuval Ne'eman. Thesis title: Aspects of time reversal symmetry violation.

During the years, Aharony was a visiting professor at Harvard University, MIT, Boston University, University of Tokyo, NTT Japan, the International Institute of Physics, UFRN, Natal, Brazil, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Jerusalem, the Institute of theoretical physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. He was also a Distinguished Professor at the National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan and a visiting scientist at the IBM Research laboratories in Yorktown Heights and in Zürich, the US National Laboratories in Argonne and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Beijing Computational Science Research Center and the Institute for Basic Science in Daejeon, Korea. Aharony was also an adjunct professor in the University of Oslo, Norway during the years 1987–2012, and a Consultant at IBM Research, MIT and the Weizmann Institute of Science (1987–present). His work on random systems involved systems with random fields and the general issues of self-averaging. Aharony introduced fractal geometry into several branches of statistical physics, especially in connection with the many fractal sub-structures of dilute percolating systems, with applications to oil recovery.

Quantum magnetism: Aharony explained the structures and phase diagrams of magnetic oxide systems. This includes the magnetic structures of the high temperature superconducting parent cuprates, and the prediction of the spin glass phase there, the discovery of a special symmetry in the Dzyaloshinskii-Moria interaction (now called the Shekhtman-Entin-Wohlman-Aharony symmetry) and the ordered phases of various multiferroic materials.

Mesoscopic physics: Aharony participated in critical discussions of the Aharonov-Bohm interferometer.

In recent years, he concentrates on the effects of the spin-orbit interaction on transport in mesoscopic spintronic systems, including proposals of spin filters which may be relevant to quantum information processing.

Publications Aharony is the author of 8 books and more than 450 articles. According to Google Scholar (September 2023) he has more than 50,000 citations and his h-index is 87.

Selected books A. Aharony and J. Feder, editors. Fractals in Physics. Proceedings of a Conference, Vence, France (North Holland, Amsterdam, 1989) D. Stauffer and A. Aharony. Introduction to Percolation Theory. Taylor and Francis, London (1992); revised 2nd edition (1994); German translation: Perkolationstheorie, Eine Einführung, VCH, Weinheim (1995); Japanese translation: PA-KO RE-SHON NO KI HON GEN RI, Yoshiokashoten, Kyoto (2001). A. Aharony and O. Entin-Wohlman, editors. Perspectives of Mesoscopic Physics. World Scientific, Singapore (2010) A. Aharony and O. Entin-Wohlman. Introduction to Solid State Physics. In Hebrew, Open University, Israel (2018), 600 pages; English translation: World Scientific, Singapore (2018)

Honors and awards Fulbright Fellowship, US, 1972 Fellow, American Physical Society, USA, 1985, "for contributions to the theory of new critical and multicritical points, of random field systems and their experimental realization and of using fractals in statistical physics and in percolation" Foreign Member, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, Oslo, Norway, 1988 Member, Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, Trondheim, Norway, 1993 Foreign Honorary Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2002 psychologist Dr. Tamar Aharony and Professor of music Iddo Aharony.