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.
Feb 11, 2019...
Prof. Oded Aharonson and the Beresheet lunar craft
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—February 11, 2019—After an enterprise lasting nearly a decade, the Israeli unmanned Moon mission “Beresheet” (“Genesis” in Hebrew) will soon take off from Earth, bound for the Moon’s rocky surface. Prof. Oded Aharonson of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences is head of the international science team, and will be watching closely as the craft approaches the Moon and initiates the scientific part of the mission, which will start well before touchdown.
Dec 15, 2015...
Five Gregory School students will travel to Israel to participate in the Shalheveth Freier International Physics Tournament this April. The team will build a safe and attempt to crack safes made by other schools around the world during the three day competition.
Juniors Elaine Wright, Jaiveer Katariya, Daniel Leighou, Tianyi Zhu, and senior Moritz Gloesslein were selected for the school’s team. Twelve students applied in hopes of attending the tournament. Juniors and seniors were eligible to apply for one of the five spots. Jaiveer Katariya said, “I’m extremely honored that I have the opportunity to represent our community in Israel.”
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/feature-stories/when-the-earth-shakes/
Sep 01, 2003...
How many people can say that their job is directly related to those long, glorious days of childhood, when the only responsibility you had was to be home in time for dinner? Dr. Einat Aharonov is one of the lucky ones. Throughout her youth, she enjoyed long hikes, and contemplating the forces that shaped the mountains, rocks, and land that she loved.
"As a child, I was fascinated by how mountains were once under the sea and that you could find seashells on mountain sides," she says. "I wanted to understand the large forces of nature that could do that."
Jul 23, 2015...
Six of eight atomic ions trappedin a quantum state in the lab of Dr. Roee Ozeri
As large objects, we’re limited to existing in one place, and one state, at a time. Quantum particles have a much more interesting existence: According to quantum theory, they can be in different places, in different states, doing different things – all at the same time.
Computers based on quantum mechanics might complete, reasonably quickly, calculations that would take today’s computers a million years. One necessary step to creating such a quantum computer is to design a switch that can be in two states at once (i.e., zero and one). Scientists in the Institute’s Faculty of Physics are on the cutting edge of this field. Prof. Ady Stern has invented a method to check whether a type of system based on the movement of composite particles – arising from the collective behavior of electrons in a magnetic field – can be one such switch, called a topological quantum switch.
Dec 13, 2011... REHOVOT, ISRAEL—December 13, 2011— Today’s announcement from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva points to promising signs for the existence of the Higgs boson. The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator. Researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science have been prominent participants in ATLAS, one of the two LHC experiments (the other is the CMS, or Compact Muon Solenoid) to produce results in the search for this elementary particle. Prof. Giora Mikenberg was the ATLAS Muon Project Leader for many years and now heads the Israeli LHC team. Prof. Ehud Duchovni heads Weizmann’s ATLAS group, as well as a small group looking for signals that relate to supersymmetry (SUSY, which deals with possible solutions to theoretical problems). Prof. Eilam Gross is currently the ATLAS Higgs physics group convener. Each of these scientists, members of the Weizmann Institute’s Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, have been part of the effort to find the Higgs since 1987.
Jan 21, 2019...
Under general relativity, a black hole is inescapable. Once something travels beyond the event horizon into the heart of the black hole, there’s no return. So intense is the gravitational force of a black hole that not even light - the fastest thing in the Universe - can achieve escape velocity.
Under general relativity, therefore, a black hole emits no electromagnetic radiation. But, as a young Stephen Hawking theorised in 1974, it does emit something when you add quantum mechanics to the mix.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/xenon1t-dark-matter-experiment-launched/
Nov 12, 2015...
The Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory’s Hall B, with illuminated building and water tank in the back
REHOVOT, ISRAEL—November 12, 2015—There is five times more dark matter in the universe than so-called normal matter – the atoms and molecules that we know. Yet we still don’t know what makes up this dark component. On November 11, 2015, an international team of scientists inaugurated the new XENON1T experiment, which has been designed to search for dark matter with unprecedented sensitivity, in the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory in Italy.
Mar 28, 2018...
Prof. Avishay Gal-Yam
Many stars die with a whimper, subsiding into cool, small stars, but the most massive go out with a bang. These giants produce elements in their cores, and when the stars explode into the spectacular phenomena known as supernovae, the power of the event scatters the elements far into space. You could even say that supernovae are responsible for life on Earth, since the explosions are the source of most of the elements found on our planet and in our bodies.
Jun 19, 2017...
The Spring Citadel was excavated in the City of David National Park by dozens of researchers led by Professor Ronny Reich of the University of Haifa and Eli Shukrun of the Israel Antiquities Authority and dated to 3,800 years ago. (City of David)
A new Weizmann Institute study has discovered radiocarbon-dating evidence of the First Temple period under a tower in Jerusalem’s City of David that was previously dated to the Canaanite period. The findings, based on soil samples taken from under a seven-meter thick walled tower, shave nearly a thousand years from previous archaeological dating of the structure, which placed it c. 1700 BCE — and contradict a presumed biblical linkage to the site.
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.
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