Married to Nily, an educational psychologist, and father of two. His brother, Dov Aharonov, is a professor emeritus at the Faculty of Mathematics at the Technion, and his niece, Dorit Aharonov, is a professor at the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
In 1988, Aharonov, David Albert, and Lev Vaidman published their theory of weak values.[8] 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.[9] Working with Aharon Casher, they predicted the Aharonov–Casher effect, the electrodynamic dual of the Aharonov–Bohm effect with magnetic dipoles and charges.[2]
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.[14]
^"Yakir Aharonov". Wolf Foundation. 2018-12-10. Retrieved 2023-10-16.
^Yakir Aharonov; David Z. Albert; Lev Vaidman (1988). "How the result of a measurement of a component of the spin of a spin-1/2 particle can turn out to be 100". Physical Review Letters. 60 (14): 1351–1354. Bibcode:1988PhRvL..60.1351A. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.60.1351. PMID10038016.
