Measuring the detailed features of the newly discovered Higgs boson constitutes the main program of the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN for the forthcoming years. These features might reveal the existence of additional elementary scalar particles.
Rare processes, known as flavor changing neutral current processes, might reveal the existence of new physics, related to matter particles of force carriers that are too massive to be directly produced in experiments. A particular aspect of flavor physics is CP violation: the difference in the way that particles and antiparticles interact.
In the beginning, matter and antimatter were present in the Universe in equal quantities. Along the history of the Universe, antimatter disappeared while matter survived. The CP violation observed in experiments is not strong enough to explain how has so much matter survived when antimatter disappeared.
About twenty percent of the energy budget of the Universe is presumably made of massive particles that have no electric charge, known as dark matter. The identity of these dark matter particles is an open question.
In collaboration with Dr. Meytal Eran Jona, a sociologist and gender-expert, we are analyzing the barriers to female physicists for an academic career in Israel. We focus mainly on two stages: At the end of the Ph.D., deciding whether to go for a postdoc and, at the end of the postdoc, competing for a tenure track position. We study the personal aspects, the organizational aspects, and the competition from the labor market. Our conclusions, with suggestions for overcoming the barriers and identifying opportunities, are shared with the academic institutes and the physics community via lectures, meetings, and our website.
