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://www.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.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/science-tips-june-2008/
Jun 02, 2008...
Scientists in the Weizmann Institute’s Faculty of Chemistry, together with colleagues in Germany, have made a startling prediction: Simply “taking the temperature” of certain quantum systems at frequent intervals might cause them to disobey a hard and fast rule of thermodynamics.
Thermodynamics tell us that the interaction between a large heat source (a heat bath) and an ensemble of much smaller systems must bring them – at least on average – progressively closer to thermal equilibrium. Now Prof. Gershon Kurizki, Dr. Noam Erez, and doctoral student Goren Gordon of the Chemical Physics Department, in collaboration with Dr. Mathias Nest of Potsdam University, Germany, have shown that ensembles of quantum systems in thermal contact with a heat bath could present a drastic departure from this allegedly universal trend, a prediction they recently reported in Nature.
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.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/science-tips-april-2011/
Mar 31, 2011...
When we suddenly get the answer to a riddle or understand the solution to a problem, we can practically feel the light bulb click on in our head. But what happens after the “aha!” moment? Why do the things we learn through sudden insight tend to stick in our memory?
“Much of memory research involves repetitive, rote learning,” says Kelly Ludmer, a research student in the group of Prof. Yadin Dudai of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Neurobiology, “but in fact, we regularly absorb large blocks of information in the blink of an eye and remember things quite well from single events. Insight is an example of a one-time event that is often well-preserved in memory.”
Oct 11, 2012...
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—October 11, 2012—The experimental system: two supersonic valves followed by two skimmers. The blue beam passes through a curved magnetic quadrupole guide, and the merged beam (purple) enters a quadrupole mass spectrometer. B is a front view of the quadrupole guide.
At very low temperatures, close to absolute zero, chemical reactions may proceed at a much higher rate than classical chemistry says they should — because in this extreme chill, quantum effects enter the picture. A Weizmann Institute of Science team has now confirmed this experimentally; their results will not only provide insight into processes in the intriguing quantum world in which particles act as waves, but they might explain how chemical reactions occur in the vast frigid regions of interstellar space.
May 17, 2016...
Researchers are cooling atoms at a laboratory in Garching, Germany, to better understand how they behave. Image courtesy of Immanuel Bloch
By cooling atoms to ultra-cold temperatures, researchers can watch interactions in slow motion and the results are giving them a new perspective into the behaviour of matter at the quantum level.
The closer you look at something, the more strangely it behaves. The smallest known particles, such as photons and electrons, follow their own rules of behaviour described as quantum physics.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/building-a-better-bowtie/
Jun 30, 2016...
A bowtie-shaped nanoparticle made of silver with a trapped semiconductor quantum dot (indicated by the red arrow)
Bowtie-shaped nanoparticles made of silver may help bring the dream of quantum computing and quantum information processing closer to reality. These nanostructures, created at the Weizmann Institute of Science and described recently in Nature Communications, greatly simplify the experimental conditions for studying quantum phenomena and may one day be developed into crucial components of quantum devices.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/light-exchange/
Sep 04, 2018...
Prof. Barak Dayan and his quantum optics lab group. From l-r: Gabi Guendelman, Dor Korn, Niv Drucker, Tal Ohana, Prof. Dayan, Moran Netser, Ziva Aqua, Ori Mor, and Dr. Adrien Borne
The quantum computers of the future will be able to perform computations that cannot be done on today’s computers. These may likely include the ability to crack the encryption that is currently used for secure electronic transactions, as well as the means to efficiently solve unwieldy problems in which the number of possible solutions increases exponentially. Research in the quantum optics lab of Prof. Barak Dayan at the Weizmann Institute of Science may be bringing such computers one step closer by providing the “quantum gates” required for communication within and between such quantum computers.
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.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/in-the-news/could-quantum-computing-be-the-end-of-free-will/
Jun 30, 2018...
Yusuf Ahmad / Reuters
Faster, more powerful computing has the potential to revolutionize fields from drug delivery to freight transportation. But some are also worried that the computers of the future could upend what it means to be human.
Quantum computing capitalizes on the quantum-physics principle that a particle may be in two states at once, as long as it does not leave a record of either state. Unlike traditional computers, which are made of bits restrained to values of zero or one, a quantum computer would allow bits to have both values simultaneously, which would lead to much faster, more powerful processing.
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