A Tel Aviv University physicist is on the short list for a 2009 Nobel Prize, according to researchers at Thomson Reuters' Healthcare and Science, who have listed the names of 25 possible winners in physiology or medicine, chemistry, physics and economics.
The real winners will begin to be named this week.
Prof. Yakir Aharonov is on the faculties of the University of South Carolina and Chapman University in Orange County, California. He, together with Prof. Michael Berry of the UK's University of Bristol, discovered the Aharonov-Bohm Effect and the related Berry Phase. The two theoretically predicted the effect, which was later proven experimentally and had a wide influence on the development of the basic principles of quantum mechanics. The effects clearly show that in quantum theory, the essence of electromagnetic forces is significantly different from the way in which they function in classical physics.
Thomson Reuters, a leader in compiling a world list of citations from scientific journals, predicted 15 percent of Nobel Prize winners between 2002 and 2008.
On October 11, TAU will open a scientific conference in honor of Aharonov's 50 years of scientific work. It will be attended by leading scientists from around the world, including Prof. David Gross, a 2004 Nobel Prize laureate in physics, from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
