לוח שנה משולב

Personalized medicine in oncology is focused on fitting drugs to the appropriate patients, mainly by identifying unique mutations in tumor genomics and development of highly selective drugs. The main challenge is that the relevant populations grow smaller, while development costs are constant, leading to significant reduction in effective drug development. The immune system provides personalized anti cancer response, and immune checkpoint inhibitors enable decent responses over a wide array of tumors. The outstanding challenge is that efficacy is observed in less than a third of the patients. Here we explore strategies to alter the patient in a way that will enable standard of care immunotherapy to exert its full potential, i.e. fitting the patients to the existing immunotherapeutic medications.

When quantum mechanics and Coulomb repulsion are combined in a pristine solid, some of the most fascinating electronic phases in nature can emerge. Interactions between electrons can form correlated insulators, electronic liquids, and in extreme cases even quantum electronic solids. These phases are predicted to exhibit their most striking features in real-space, however, they are also extremely fragile, preventing their visualization with existing experimental tools. In this talk, I will describe our experiments that use a pristine carbon nanotube as a new type of a scanning probe, capable of imaging electrical charge with unprecedented sensitivity and minimal invasiveness. I will show how using this platform we were able to obtain the first images of the quantum crystal of electrons, visualize the collective hydrodynamic flow of interacting electrons in graphene, and unravel the parent state that underlies the physics of strongly-interacting electrons in the recently-discovered system of magic angle twisted bilayer graphene.

Zoom Link: https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/93181739182?pwd=YTd0K1drTmZSdnB0bElFZVI4K0NXdz09

The cosmological constant, also known as dark energy, was believed to be caused by vacuum fluctuations, but naive calculations give results in stark disagreement with fact. In the Casimir effect, vacuum fluctuations cause forces in dielectric media, which is very well described by Lifshitz theory. Recently, using the analogy between geometries and media, a cosmological constant of the correct order of magnitude was calculated with Lifshitz theory [U. Leonhardt, Ann. Phys. (New York)  411, 167973 (2019)]. This lecture discusses the empirical evidence and the ideas behind the Lifshitz theory of the cosmological constant without requiring prior knowledge of cosmology and quantum field theory.

Astrophysical phenomena play a definitive role in our understanding of fundamental particle physics, and vice-verse.
I will present two lines of research, showcasing the interplay between particle physics theory and astrophysics.

In the first half of the talk, I will show how the viable parameter space for dark matter can be established using gravity alone.
At the lowest end of the possible range for the dark matter particle mass, the de Broglie wavelength of ultralight dark matter (ULDM) attains astronomical scales. The ensuing wave mechanics phenomena can be tested observationally in a variety of astrophysical systems. I will describe a search for the imprint of ULDM on the gas kinematics of low-surface-brightness galaxies, leading to an absolute lower bound on the mass of dark matter. A host of other systems, ranging from supermassive black holes to gravitational lensing, offer promising means to advance the search for ULDM by orders of magnitude.

In the second half of the talk, I will show how an analysis of cosmic ray antimatter — long considered a smoking gun for dark matter in the TeV range — has taken a surprising turn, leading us to new theoretical insights on the problem of the origin of loosely-bound nuclei in hadronic collisions (sometimes referred to as ``Snowballs in Hell”). The resulting research programme, now explored at the Large Hadron Collider, offers a bridge between two-particle correlation analyses to the study of nuclear clusters.