The 2016 quantum pigeonhole principle paper won PNAS's Cozzarelli Prize

physicsquantum-foundationsquantum-pigeonholeawardscozzarelli-prizepnashistory-of-science

The interviewer states, in the course of a 2026 oral-history interview with Yakir Aharonov, that the "quantum pigeonhole" paper (Aharonov, Colombo, Popescu, Sabadini, Struppa, and Tollaksen, 2016, PNAS 113:532) won the National Academy of Sciences' Cozzarelli Prize. A Chapman University newsroom announcement (dated 2017-03-03, named author Sheri Ledbetter) corroborates the award and names all six co-authors, placing the ceremony on 2017-04-30.

This is now confirmed at Tier 1, per PNAS's own announcement. A PNAS-authored press release distributed via EurekAlert! (2-Mar-2017, media contact Prashant Nair, [email protected]) names this exact paper and byline as the Class I (Physical and Mathematical Sciences) recipient of the 2016 Cozzarelli Prize. A Wayback Machine capture of pnas.org's own "Cozzarelli Prize" history page independently corroborates that a 2016 prize cycle existed and fixes its ceremony at the 154th NAS Annual Meeting in April 2017 — matching the date already recorded from Chapman's account. A third, editorially independent institutional source — a University of Bristol press release (Popescu's home institution, dated 27 March 2017) — reports the same award for the same paper. Three editorially independent institutions (PNAS/NAS itself, Chapman, Bristol) now agree on the same paper, award, and year; pnas.org's own prize page remains a blocked route to this vault's live tooling, so the EurekAlert release and the Wayback-archived pnas.org page are the reachable instantiations of PNAS's own record, not substitutes for it.