About Us
Founded in 1944, the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science develops philanthropic support for the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and advances its mission of science for the benefit of humanity.
https://weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/electrons-can-form-solid-orderly-structure/
Nov 21, 2019...
(l-r) Ilanit Shapir and Prof. Shahal Ilani answered an 80-year-old question
JERUSALEM, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) — Israeli scientists have shown that electrons can form, like atoms, an organized structure to form a solid inside a solid, the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) reported Thursday.
In a study published in the journal Science, the WIS researchers image such electron solid showing electrons arranged in a row on a nanowire, like birds on wire.
Mar 09, 2020...
Electrons spin. It's a fundamental part of their existence. Some spin “up” while others spin “down.” Scientists have known this for about a century, thanks to quantum physics.
They've also known that magnetic fields can affect the direction of an electron’s quantum spin, flipping it from up to down and vice versa. And it doesn't take much: Even a bacterial cell can do it.
Researchers at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science have found that protein “wires” connecting a bacterial cell to a solid surface tend to transmit electrons with a particular spin.
Mar 02, 2020...
The concept of time crystals comes from the realm of counterintuitive mind-melding physics ideas that may actually turn out to have real-world applications. Now comes news that a paper proposes merging time crystals with topological superconductors for applications in error-free quantum computing, extremely precise timekeeping and more.
Time crystals were first proposed as hypothetical structures by the Nobel-Prize winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek and MIT physicists in 2012. The remarkable feature of time crystals is that they would would move without using energy. As such they would appear to break the fundamental physics law of time-translation symmetry. They would move while staying in their ground states, when they are at their lowest energy, appearing to be in a kind of perpetual motion. Wilczek offered mathematical proof that showed how atoms of crystallizing matter could regularly form repeating lattices in time, while not consuming or producing any energy.
Dec 10, 2019...
A “river” of electrons flowing in a graphene channel. The viscosity generated by the repulsion between electrons (red balls) causes them to flow with a parabolic current density, illustrated here as a white foam wave-front
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—December 10, 2019—We often speak of electrons “flowing” through materials, but in fact, they do not normally move like a liquid. However, such “hydrodynamic” electron flow had long been predicted – and now, Weizmann Institute of Science physicists have managed, with the help of a unique technique, to image electrons flowing similarly to how water moves through a pipe. This is the first time such “liquid electron flow” has been visualized, and it has vital implications for future electronic devices.
Mar 02, 2020...
To heat a slice of pizza, you probably wouldn’t consider first chilling it in the fridge. But a theoretical study suggests that cooling, as a first step before heating, may be the fastest way to warm up certain materials. In fact, such precooling could lead sometimes to exponentially faster heating, two physicists calculate in a study accepted in Physical Review Letters.
The concept is similar to the Mpemba effect, the counterintuitive — and controversial — observation that hot water sometimes freezes faster than cold water (SN: 1/6/17). Scientists still don’t agree on why the Mpemba effect occurs, and it’s difficult to reproduce the effect consistently. The new study is “a way of thinking of effects like the Mpemba effect from a different perspective,” says physicist Andrés Santos of Universidad de Extremadura in Badajoz, Spain, who was not involved with the research.
Aug 01, 2019...
What is your field of study?
I did my doctorate in high-energy physics – particle physics – and my research is on astroparticles.
Could you explain to laypeople what that means?
As we all learned in high school, we are made of molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons and electrons. But we can actually go down to a more precise resolution because the protons and neutrons are composed of smaller particles, called quarks. And there are also a great many more particles that are created at very high energies. With particle accelerators – if they are particle accelerators such as the sun, gamma-ray bursts and supernovas –
Feb 24, 2020... In October 2019, Google announced that its quantum computer, Sycamore, had done a calculation in three minutes and 20 seconds that would have taken the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years. “Quantum supremacy,” Google claimed for itself. We now have a quantum computer, it was saying, capable of performing calculations that no regular, “classical” computer is capable of doing in a reasonable time.
Jun 20, 2019... ‘This is the first time anyone has been able to control the spatial orientation of chiral molecules with light,’ says Ilya Averbukh from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. His theory group teamed up with Valery Milner’s experimental team from the University of British Columbia, Canada, to build a laser setup called an optical centrifuge that can spin chiral molecules depending on their handedness.
May 13, 2020...
Israeli researchers have discovered new entities created from interaction between matter and light particles, Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) reported Wednesday.
The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, has several implications in developing quantum applications, fine control of chemical processes and designing new materials.
The difference between light and matter should be a clear and simple division, but there are situations in which the two become so closely connected that the situation becomes blurred.
Jun 22, 2020... In 2018 it was discovered that two layers of graphene twisted one with respect to the other by a “magic” angle show a variety of interesting quantum phases, including superconductivity, magnetism and insulating behaviours. Now a team of researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science led by Prof. Shahal Ilani of the Condensed Matter Physics Department, in collaboration with Prof. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero’s group at MIT, have discovered that these quantum phases descend from a previously unknown high-energy “parent state,” with an unusual breaking of symmetry.
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