Greetings 2011

  • Congratulations to Eli Yona, who received a departmental excellence prize from the Racah Institute. The prize was awarded to him for his excellent service, initiative and care during many years of developing, maintening and performing experimental demonstrations in physics lectures.

  • Congratulations to Prof. Jacob Bekenstein who received the Weizmann Prize for research in the natural sciences. The prize, awarded by the city council of Tel Aviv, is given to him for his fundamental contributions to the understanding of the thermodynamics of black holes and quantum gravity.



  • Congratulations to Prof. Re'em Sari who was awarded the Michael Bruno Prize of Yad ha Nadiv (Rothschild Foundation).

  • Congratulations to Dr. Michael Assaf and to Dr. Efi Efrati, who were awarded the Katzir Prize for excellent Ph.D theses. Congratulations also to their advisors, Prof. Baruch Meerson, Prof. Eran Sharon and Prof. Raz Kupferman.

  • Congratulations to Re'em Sari, who was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for 2011 from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

  • Congratulations to Oded Yaakobi who was awarded the Birnholtz Prize for research in applied physics, for his Ph.D work, supervised by Lazar Friedland.

  • Greetings to Prof. Avi Schiller, who was cited in the list of the best lecturers, compiled by the student association at the Hebrew University.

  • Congratulations to Pavel Khain for winning the prize for the best poster in the Hope Conference in Tokyo.

  •  Dr. Guy Ron, who was recently appointed as a senior lecturer at the Racah Institute will arrive this week to start his appointment.
    While his permanent lab is under construction in the Kaplun basement, during the coming months he will be temporarily located
    in the Danciger B building (room 121, phone number 85200) and his temporary lab will be in the nearby room 120.
    Guy's research involves experimental tests of the standard model of particle physics and attempts to detect effects beyond the Standard
    Model by performing extremely accurate measurements at low energies. In essence, this is looking for effects from high energy "propagating
    downwards" and having a tiny effect on low energy measurements. To this end Guy plans to study the decay of radioactive neon atoms held in
    a Magneto-Optical trap and search for small deviations from the expected angular distributions of the decay products. Any deviation from the
    predicted results is a clear sign of physics beyond the Standard Model. The experiments will take place at the new accelerator being built at
    the Soreq Nuclear Research Facility. 

  • The recent work of Baruch Meerson and collaborators on strategies for mass vaccination, attracts much media attention. See, e.g.:
    http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-01/thuo-wpp010311.php
    With the current flu epidemic, the timing could not be better.. 

  • The University of Shanghai has published it new international ranking of physics departments:
    http://www.arwu.org/SubjectPhysics2010.jsp
    We are ranked first among the Israeli physics departments,
    together with Weizmann. Thanks to Eliezer Rabinovici for
    sending me this link.
Greetings 2010