Chapman University professor Yakir Aharonov will be admitted this July into the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences and the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.
Aharonov, widely regarded as a leading contemporary quantum theorist, joins the likes of Isaac Newtown, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and Stephen Hawking in an elite group of Royal Society fellows. Fellows are leaders in their fields and come from all parts of the world. They are elected for life through a peer review process based on excellence in science.
The honor, akin to a lifetime achievement award, recognizes the 91-year-old’s breakthroughs in physics dating back to his seminal research in the late 1950s. His co-discovery of the Aharonov-Bohm Effect in 1959 on the action of atomic particles around a magnetic field is considered today one of the cornerstones of modern physics. Throughout his career, he has been recognized for having discovered more than 30 fundamental physics effects.
“Yakir is arguably one of the very best theoretical quantum physicists alive,” Chapman University President Daniele Struppa said in a statement. “His impact in physics has been tremendous. What is extraordinary about Yakir is the fact that he has built on his most famous work — the Aharonov-Bohm Effect of 1959 — to make more and more exciting discoveries. He has reformulated quantum mechanics in a totally novel way, thus offering a new way to predict the singular behavior of quantum systems.”
“It is an honor to have someone of Yakir’s stature as a member of the Chapman community,” Stupa added. “Yakir continues to be an extremely active and creative scientist, and I’m sure we will see many more brilliant contributions from him in the years to come.”
Aharonov previously won the Wolf Foundation Prize in Physics, considered one of the most important awards in the field. In 2010, then-U.S. President Barack Obama presented him with the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States.
Born in Haifa, Israel, in 1932, Aharonov was formerly a professor of physics at Tel Aviv University (where he is professor emeritus), as well as USC and George Mason University, before joining the Chapman faculty in 2008. He is director of the Institute for Quantum Studies.
“Aharonov is a giant of science,” said another principal collaborator of Chapman’s Institute for Quantum Studies, Sandu Popescu. “Among all the present-day physicists, he made some of the most significant and wide-ranging contributions in shaping our understanding of what the nature of quantum mechanics is.”
On choosing Chapman in 2008, Aharonov said that he “could have gone to any university in the world,” but he chose the school in Orange because he would have an opportunity to “create one of the best institutions in the world.”
Chapman has striven to expand its research agenda in the 21st century. Now, in terms of research productivity, Chapman ranks among some of the top universities in the United States and the school has seen a 9,000% increase in citations of its professors’ research over the past two decades, Provost Norma Bouchard announced at commencement last month.
The Institute of Quantum Studies continues to expand and will have a new headquarters next year at the redeveloped Killefer School complex. The historic site in Orange was home to an elementary school where classes were integrated in 1944, three years before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ended segregation in Orange County schools in a case that would set a precedent for the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision for Brown v. Board of Education that separating children in public schools based on race was unconstitutional. The university has purchased the property from the school district and plans a restoration as part of the project
Even at 91, Ahoronov continues to push forward with research, spending part of June at a conference in Egypt before his July induction into the Royal Society in London.
“He keeps pursuing riddles, incessantly challenging mathematical formalism’s limits while guided by the simplicity and beauty of physical law,” the Royal Society wrote of the nonagenarian in a fellows directory. “Laboratory experiments keep verifying his predictions, even the most surprising ones.”
