Yakir Aharonov

Yakir Aharonov (; born August 28, 1932) is an Israeli physicist specializing in quantum physics. He has been a Professor of Theoretical Physics and the James J. Farley Professor of Natural Philosophy at Chapman University in California since 2008. He was a distinguished professor in the Perimeter Institute between 2009-2012 and is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and at University of South Carolina. He is president of the IYAR, The Israeli Institute for Advanced Research.

In June 2024 he was elected to serve in the Royal Society of London.

Biography Yakir Aharonov was born in Haifa. He received his undergraduate education at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, graduating with a BSc in 1956. He continued his graduate studies at the Technion and then moved to Bristol University, UK together with his doctoral advisor David Bohm, receiving a Ph.D. degree in 1960. Aharonov later taught at Brandeis University from 1960 to 1961 and the Yeshiva University from 1964 to 1967, both in the United States. for which he co-received the 1998 Wolf Prize.

In 1988, Aharonov, David Albert, and Lev Vaidman published their theory of weak values. This work was motivated by Aharonov's long-time quest to experimentally verify his theory that apparently random events in quantum mechanics are caused by events in the future (two-state vector formalism). Verifying a present effect of a future cause requires a measurement, which would ordinarily destroy coherence and ruin the experiment. He and his colleagues claim that they were able to use weak measurements and verify the present effect of the future cause. Working with Aharon Casher, they predicted the Aharonov–Casher effect, the electrodynamic dual of the Aharonov–Bohm effect with magnetic dipoles and charges. 1984: Weizmann Prize in Physics 1984: Rothschild Prize in Physics 2006: EMET Prize in Exact Science In 2009, the information service Thomson Reuters named Aharonov as leading candidate for the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics, based on his work's influence on quantum physics. 2010: National Medal of Science (2009), awarded and presented by President Barack Obama 2024: Foreign Member of the Royal Society