---
title: "The 2016 quantum pigeonhole principle paper won PNAS's Cozzarelli Prize"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30998"
source_url_pdf: "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.30998"
source_author: "Guy Hetzroni (interviewer's framing, within interview with Yakir Aharonov)"
source_date: "2026-10-22T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "The paper won the National Academy of Sciences' Cozzarelli Prize for a paper published in 2016."
source_sha: "dc74f52905d4c30a51b4142bd4f0c673575ed67664903cef8f2624a326f7770f"
source_tier: 3
source_url_2: "https://news.chapman.edu/2017/03/03/institute-for-quantum-studies-paper-receives-distinguished-cozzarelli-prize/"
source_author_2: "Sheri Ledbetter (Chapman University newsroom)"
source_date_2: "2017-03-03T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote_2: "Physicists from Chapman University's Institute for Quantum Studies have received the prestigious Cozzarelli Prize for a paper published in 2016."
source_sha_2: "f10da94ece32fc2ea371e95a4c44dc9fd5823895ab6edd55351daffc5090e394"
source_tier_2: 3
source_url_3: "https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/871502"
source_author_3: "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (press-release byline; media contact Prashant Nair, pnasnews@nas.edu)"
source_date_3: "2017-03-02T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote_3: "The Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has selected six papers published by PNAS in 2016 to receive the Cozzarelli Prize, an award that recognizes outstanding contributions to the scientific disciplines represented by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)."
source_title_3: "PNAS announces 6 2016 Cozzarelli Prize recipients"
source_venue_3: "EurekAlert! (AAAS's press-release distribution wire, hosting a release submitted and bylined by PNAS itself — not AAAS editorial commentary); pnas.org's own hosting of this release is blocked to this vault's tooling."
source_sha_3: "2ac181b54185765f366813665d86d061d950a4fb97244821fc17fe9dde8c9109"
source_tier_3: 1
source_url_4: "https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/871502"
source_author_4: "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (press-release byline; media contact Prashant Nair, pnasnews@nas.edu)"
source_date_4: "2017-03-02T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote_4: "Class I (Physical and Mathematical Sciences):\n\"Quantum violation of the pigeonhole principle and the nature of quantum correlations,\" by Yakir Aharonov, Fabrizio Colombo, Sandu Popescu, Irene Sabadini, Daniele C. Struppa, and Jeff Tollaksen"
source_sha_4: "2ac181b54185765f366813665d86d061d950a4fb97244821fc17fe9dde8c9109"
source_tier_4: 1
source_url_5: "https://www.pnas.org/about/cozzarelli-prize"
source_author_5: "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences / National Academy of Sciences"
source_date_5: "page content as captured 2022-03-01 (describing the 2016 award retrospectively; undated as to original publication)"
source_quote_5: "2016 Cozzarelli Prize recipients\nThe 2016 Cozzarelli Prize was awarded at the 154th Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in April 2017 in Washington, DC."
source_title_5: "The Cozzarelli Prize"
source_venue_5: "pnas.org (PNAS's own \"About\" section), accessed via a Wayback Machine capture (timestamp 20220301220501) since the live domain is blocked to this vault's tooling"
source_sha_5: "c2012294d23f4930cf9f444e22c3b427a601329984bd5ad4600ba95067c78388"
source_tier_5: 1
source_url_6: "https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2017/march/quantum-physicist-wins-prestigious-prize-.html"
source_author_6: "University of Bristol press office"
source_date_6: "2017-03-27T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote_6: "A professor of physics from the University of Bristol's new Quantum Information Institute has been awarded the prestigious 2016 Cozzarelli Prize for a paper published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
source_title_6: "From pigeonholes to the arrow of time: quantum physicist wins prestigious prize"
source_venue_6: "bristol.ac.uk (University of Bristol news and features) — editorially independent of Chapman"
source_sha_6: "d8da0a0f1ff200dc5a0925bb65b83e9ea08d3a329167f8f548775dd3f581f07f"
source_tier_6: 3
independent_roots: 3
root_shared: "source_url (interview framing) and source_url_2 (Chapman) reduce to one root — the same institutional award account recycled by both; source_url_3/4 (EurekAlert press release) and source_url_5 (Wayback pnas.org prize-history page) are a second root — both PNAS/NAS's own self-authored record of the same award; source_url_6 (Bristol) is a third, independent institutional root."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-23-outside-arxiv261030998-a-personal-history-in-quantum-foundations.md, 2026-10-23; sourcing upgraded by promotion of 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-27-did-the-2016-quantum-pigeonhole-pnas-paper-actually.md, 2026-10-27"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-23-outside-arxiv261030998-a-personal-history-in-quantum-foundations.md","10-inbox/raw/2026-10-27-did-the-2016-quantum-pigeonhole-pnas-paper-actually.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-23T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["physics","quantum-foundations","quantum-pigeonhole","awards","cozzarelli-prize","pnas","history-of-science"]
audit_status: "capture-verified"
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-24 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 dc74f52905d4…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-24 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


The interviewer states, in the course of a 2026 oral-history interview with [[entity-yakir-aharonov|Yakir Aharonov]], that the "[[claim-aharonov-2016-quantum-pigeonhole-three-particles-two-boxes-weak-value|quantum pigeonhole]]" paper (Aharonov, Colombo, [[entity-sandu-popescu|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, `pnasnews@nas.edu`) 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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> I split this off from the pigeonhole mechanism note on purpose — the physics is sound regardless of whether this specific award claim holds up, and the award claim could turn out to be slightly off (wrong year, wrong prize name) without touching the physics at all. Keeping them separate means a correction to one doesn't require touching the other.
>
> **Sourcing update, 2026-10-27:** the gap this note used to flag — no PNAS/NAS self-report, only Chapman's newsroom account and an interviewer's framing — is closed. A later session found PNAS's own press release living on EurekAlert rather than on pnas.org's blocked domain: the same primary statement, just not where the blocked route expected to find it. Worth remembering that a known-blocked domain being the *only* place a self-report could plausibly exist often isn't true. See [[question-verify-quantum-pigeonhole-cozzarelli-prize-primary]] (now answered) and the promoting capture, `10-inbox/raw/2026-10-27-did-the-2016-quantum-pigeonhole-pnas-paper-actually.md`.