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 future of humanity.
Oct 20, 2020...
No sooner had the radical equations of quantum mechanics been discovered than physicists identified one of the strangest phenomena the theory allows.
“Quantum tunneling” shows how profoundly particles such as electrons differ from bigger things. Throw a ball at the wall and it bounces backward; let it roll to the bottom of a valley and it stays there. But a particle will occasionally hop through the wall. It has a chance of “slipping through the mountain and escaping from the valley,” as two physicists wrote in Nature in 1928, in one of the earliest descriptions of tunneling.
Dec 29, 2020... Quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the physics of the universe at very small scales, is notorious for defying common sense. Consider, for instance, the way that standard interpretations of the theory suggest change occurs in the quantum turf: shifts from one state to another supposedly happen unpredictably and instantaneously. Put another way, if events in our familiar world unfolded similarly to those within atoms, we would expect to routinely see batter becoming a fully baked cake without passing through any intermediate steps. Everyday experience, of course, tells us this is not the case, but for the less accessible microscopic realm, the true nature of such “quantum jumps” has been a major unsolved problem in physics.
Nov 18, 2022... Dr. Sivan Refaely-Abramson of the Molecular Chemistry and Materials Science department at the Weizmann Institute shares a story about sunlight. She explains how, through the amazing world of materials, the power of the sun can transform quantum particles and be used as a main energy source. Dr. Refaely-Abramson’s research in materials science is dedicated to designing intelligent energy conversion in order to consume energy in a way that is clean, green, and unlimited. “Understanding materials and the way particles interact within them allows for new and smart ways to harness sunlight, leading us to a cleaner greener future.”
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