Avital Deri, a doctoral student at the Weizmann Institute, won the FeyLab Israel 2015 competition * researching the neutrinos absorbed by the IceCube experiment in Antarctica * the finals of the FeyLab competition took place this evening (Thursday) at the Hamada Center in Tel Aviv, in collaboration with Hamada, the National Academy of Sciences, and the British Council * This was the seventh FeyLab competition, and all of them were won by female scientists
Avital Dari, a doctoral student in the group that studies the theories of particle physics at the Weizmann Institute, is the winner of the Israeli final of the FeyLab competition, in which scientists explain science to the general public in three minutes. Derry is the seventh winner. In all six previous competitions as well, female scientists won a prize - a trip to the Cheltenham Science Festival in Great Britain and participation in the finals of the global FeyLab competition.
Contestants in the competition, bachelor's and master's degree graduates dealing with physics, who are required to present a scientific topic to an audience in 3 minutes in an exciting, precise and clear manner. Usually the topic is free, but this time the competition was dedicated to the field of physics, to mark the 60th anniversary of the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva and on the occasion of Israel joining this year as a full member of the European Research Center in Geneva and special for physics lectures. The competition is organized by the Israeli National Academy of Sciences with Hamda - the center for scientific education in Tel Aviv. Because of this, of course, all the participants this year were physicists, including, of course, the five finalists.
This year's judges were Prof. Yoram Rosen from the Faculty of Physics at the Technion, Associate Prof. Ayelet Baram Tzbari, a science communication researcher from the Department of Science Teaching at the Technion, and the journalist Aviv Lavi (GLC).
Dari explained to the audience what the neutrino particles are: "All the time a flux of a trillion particles per second passes through each of us. They are transparent to us and we are transparent to them."
The Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli came across an experiment he conducted in 1930 in which the energy balance apparently violated the law of conservation of energy. Because of this, he predicted the existence of a particle that takes some of the energy with it and calculated its properties, however these properties - the almost complete absence of contact with ordinary matter, will mean that it will not be possible to discover it. He bet on a case of champagne.
"I predicted the existence of a particle that no one would discover," he said and bet on a case of champagne, but in the end the neutrino was discovered experimentally by a team led by Frederic Raines, in 1956, in experiments at the "Savannah River" nuclear reactor. Pauli, who was still an active physicist, had to fulfill his promise by intervening.
"The neutrinos are elementary particles like, for example, electrons, but they have no electric charge. They move at the speed of light but penetrate any obstacle. The neutrinos do not maintain contact with matter except rarely, once in a lifetime a neutrino particle will move one atom in our body."
However, in order to increase the chance of measuring a neutrino encounter with normal matter, an experiment known as "IceCube" was set up in Antarctica, in which a cube with a length, width and depth of kilometers was enclosed in ice (a cubic kilometer), and inside it were sensors designed to detect the traces of such an impact on the ice. On average, every eleven such interactions are recorded, left behind by neutrino particles created in the Big Bang and making their way to the South Pole over 14 billion years. In a few years we will be able to build a picture of the first moments of the universe thanks to the most indifferent particles in the universe."
"We already have a picture of the universe when it was 370 thousand years old. Before that the universe was opaque to light but was transparent to neutrinos up to the first minus ten second. For the first 370 years, the neutrino particles moved freely while the light was closed. Thus neutrinos are the key to learning about what happened at the beginning of the universe before light.
In a conversation with the science website after the win, Derry said that she is now at the beginning of her doctorate. "I studied at the Hebrew University for a bachelor's degree in physics, after which I did a conversion and went to study music at the Academy of Music (classical music singer) and only after that I came to the Weizmann Institute for a master's and a third degree. I am interested in education, this year I taught a class for children in astronomy at the Weizmann Institute and lecture in school classes that come to the institute on particles. I think it's important."
How did you come to study the neutrino particles?
Derry: "I always knew that I was interested in the most basic science there is. After a course by my supervisor Yossi Nir in particle physics I realized that this is the field that speaks to me. This is a very aesthetic field in my eyes. It's fascinating to learn about the building blocks of the matter of space and to see how the smallest things like neutrinos connect to the biggest things like the big bang that are usually talked about in the context of astrophysics. This is a beautiful example of how the smallest connects to the largest. We learn from each other, we learn from the particles about the big bang and the expansion of the universe, and from things that happen in astrophysics, we learn about particles."
How do you explain that so far only girls have won the FeyLab competition?
"Already in the semi-finals, all my competitors were laughing that there is already a winner, there is no need to make all the fuss. I told them that until now all the winners were biological."
