Orange County Register

Aharonov

The information service Thomson Reuters predicts that Chapman University’s Yakir Aharonov  will win this year’s Nobel Prize in physics, based on how influential his work has been over the years in quantum physics. Anaronov is one of seven scientists — including UCSD’s Sheldon  Schultz — that TR says are contenders this year.

TR has correctly predicted 15 Nobel Prize winners since 2005, the service says in a statement. The Nobel Committee will announce this year’s winners during the period of Oct. 5-12. The committee usually gives a Nobel to 2-3 people in disciplines like physics and chemistry.

The company says it uses “data from ISI Web of Knowledge, the world’s largest citation environment of the highest quality scholarly literature, is used to quantitatively determine the most influential researchers in the Nobel categories of Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics. These high-impact researchers are named Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates and predicted to be Nobel Prize winners, either this year or in the near future, based on the citation impact of their published research.”

Thomson Reuter says that Aharonov will likely share this year’s Nobel in physics with Sir Michael V. Berry, a researcher at the University of Bristol.

Aharonov, 76, was traveling and could not be reached for comment. If he wins, he’ll become Chapman’s second Nobelist. Vernon Smith won for his contributions to economists. Chapman recruited both scholars from George Mason University. UCI’s Frederick Reines won the Nobel in physics in 1995.

Aharonov’s work is very difficult to state simply. Wikipedia sums it up this way: “The Aharonov–Bohm effect, sometimes called the Ehrenberg–Siday–Aharonov–Bohm effect, is a quantum mechanical phenomenon by which an electrically charged particle is affected by the electromagnetic potential A in regions in which both the magnetic field B and electric field E are zero. In general, the profound consequence of Aharonov–Bohm effect was the realisation that the electromagnetic potential offers a more complete description of electromagnetism than the electric and magnetic fields can. In classical electromagnetism the two descriptions were equivalent. With the addition of quantum theory, though, the electromagnetic potential A is seen as being more fundamental or “real”; the E and B fields can be derived from the potential A, but the potential can not be derived from the E and B fields. Furthermore some physical effects are dependent only on A, which the E and B fields are simply unable to account for.”

Menas Kafatos, dean of the Schmid College of Science, said this “is great news. He is a great scientist and this is recognition of how he has influenced physics.”

Nobel laureate Sir Anthony Leggett once said in a speech that Aharonov “is the most distinguished living exponent of the theory of the foundation of quantum mechanics.”

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.