Osheroff, who was a member of the commission of inquiry into the Columbia disaster, won the Nobel Prize in 1996 for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3
The 56th annual convention of the Israel Physics Society will be held during the Hanukkah holiday, on December 5, 2010, at the Tel Aviv University campus. About 400 to 500 physicists from all over the country and a number of guests from abroad are expected to participate in the conference. The convention will be devoted mostly to the review of the many and varied research in all fields of physics, conducted in the various academic and research institutes in Israel - from the most elementary particles to the astrophysics of the entire universe, with everything in between.
According to Prof. Ron Lifshitz from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, who heads the committee organizing the conference, there was no difficulty in building an entire conference on the purity of Israeli research, with very few guests from abroad, since the physics research conducted in Israel is innovative, Fascinating, and first class in the world. On the contrary, it was difficult to determine among all the excellent works that were submitted those that were allocated time in the program.
Two guests were invited to the plenary lectures given in the presence of everyone on the convention island. The opening lecture, which will be given by Prof. Zahid Hassan from Princeton University, will be on a particularly exciting topic - "topological insulators and superconductors". These are new substances that have been discovered not long ago, which fundamentally change the understanding of physicists regarding the way in which the different states of aggregation of substances in nature can be characterized. The closing lecture will be given by Prof. Douglas Oshroff from Stanford University. He will describe the various moves that led him to the surprising discovery of the superfluid phase in helium-3 while he was still a doctoral student - a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996. Superfluidity is a property, derived from quantum theory, according to which certain liquids at very low temperatures can flow Without any friction, similar to superconductivity where electric current flows without resistance.
Prof. Osheroff served, among other things, as a member of the investigative committee for the Columbia space shuttle disaster in which the Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon was also killed. The committee's conclusions were implemented in the following shuttle flights, and raised the threshold of sensitivity to malfunctions in the external fuel tank that were previously not taken seriously.
Over 200 works will be presented at the conference and 22 parallel sessions will be held that will deal with many and varied topics such as high energies, elementary particles, astrophysics and astronomy, nanophysics, superconductivity and magnetism, classical and quantum optics, solid state, quantum computing, biophysics, atomic physics and more. There will also be a session that will deal with physics studies in middle schools and high schools.
