[su_spoiler title=”מפגשי אונליין” style=”fancy” icon=”chevron-circle” anchor=”online”]

[su_spoiler title=”מידע על הפקולטות” style=”fancy” icon=”chevron-circle” anchor=”faculties”]

[su_spoiler title=”תשובות לשאלות נפוצות” style=”fancy” icon=”chevron-circle” anchor=”faq”]

[su_spoiler title=”מועמדים לרפואה” style=”fancy” icon=”chevron-circle” anchor=”refua”]

[su_spoiler title=”COTERET” open=”yes” style=”fancy” icon=”chevron-circle” anchor=”refua”]

CONTENT

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“No one prepares you for the moment when you will be a refugee in your own country.”

Hila Hatsav, a “Sderot refugee,” as she calls herself, was supposed to enter the Technion dormitories on October 10^th, before beginning her studies in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning.

On October 7^th, following the heavy rocket barrages on Sderot and the infiltration of armed terrorist squads into the city, she hurried to evacuate without having time to pack even a small bag – not even a pillow and a sheet. “No one prepares you,” she says, “for the moment when you become a refugee in your own country.”

On October 10^th Hila received a phone call from Malka Rosenfeld, head of the Technion Student Union (TSA), who told her: Just come, we’ll take care of everything for you. “And really, I came to the guest house at the Technion to an apartment that had been arranged for me. They provided me with clothes, toiletries, food—whatever I was missing. Even a computer that allows me to study these days. And no less important – I met an amazing team here, from a student who volunteered to introduce me to the Technion in the early days to the president of the Technion who met me and asked to hear my story.”

Hila doesn’t know when she’ll be able to return to her home in Sderot, but she feels safe and loved here at the Technion. “I experienced solidarity, camaraderie, and community that you can’t experience anywhere else in the world. I am so happy that I came here and chose to study here. It was my dream to study here even before I knew what good people there were at the Technion.”

Since the beginning of the war, the Technion has begun absorbing evacuated residents from the south and north. Currently, about 60 people are hosted on campus in student dormitories and at the Forchheimer guest house at the Technion.

Nanopowders are the basis of many nanotechnologies; Technion researchers coin a new term in the field of nanomechanics: “pseudo-elasticity”

 “In the scientific world today, there are two central schools of thought regarding the way nanocrystals come into contact,” says Prof. Eugene Rabkin of the Faculty of Materials Engineering at the Technion. “One school asserts that the crystals homogenously stretch in order to stick together (elastic deformation), but once they adhere, they return to their original shape. According to the other school of thought, as they approach, the inter-atom forces are strong enough to overcome the individual nanocrystals’ strength and compel them to change shape irreversibly (plastic deformation).”

Metallic nanocrystals have an orderly atomic structure, and the way in which they can undergo plastic deformation is by creating a linear “defect” in the orderly atomic structure. These linear defects, which are called “dislocations”, were first observed under a microscope in the mid-1950s and since then they have served as an important basis for understanding the mechanical characteristics of materials. Because of the size of nanocrystals, they generally have a perfect atomic structure and do not have dislocations.

 “Justification for both schools of thought has been offered, yet without a way to resolve the contradiction between them,” adds Prof. Rabkin. “On the one hand, analytical models have shown that the stresses that are created in nanocrystals during the contact formation are large enough to create a large number of dislocations; on the other hand, in experimental observations, only isolated dislocations were observed in the nanocrystalline clusters, in contradiction to the models.”

In order to resolve the contradiction, the Technion researchers used advanced simulation tools that run on high-performance parallel computer located on campus. “The calculation is performed at the atomic level,” relates Dr. Dan Mordehai who today is a member of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technion, but who was a post-doctoral fellow in Prof. Rabkin’s group when the research was conducted. “We describe the nanocrystals using the atoms that comprise them and the forces between these atoms, and thus, we actually allow the atoms to choose their preferred “path”. These calculations include several hundreds of thousands of atoms and we have to execute them on parallel computer – that is, execute the calculation on a number of computers simultaneously.”

The Technion researchers found, for all intents and purposes, that neither of the schools of thought described the process in its entirety. In their simulation they showed that when the nanocrystals approach each other, the force of their interaction rises to become as great as that which creates many dislocations (as predicted by the second school of thought). Nevertheless, during the adhering process between the nanocrystals, additional dislocations are created, which “repair” the defects, and by the end of the adhering process, they no longer have any dislocations, as observed during experiments.

Thus the new nanomechanical term, coined by the Technion researchers, “pseudo-elasticity” was born. This mechanism enables nanocrystals to retain their original shape, despite the forces acting upon them, which are large enough to overcome their own strength limit. This mechanism may have great importance in many additional fields in contact mechanics for each pair of bodies that gets within a few nanometers of each other.

Prof. David Srolovitz, who is the head of the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore, participated in this research.

Above: Pictures of the simulations that were performed in the Technion show the process of contact formation between two nanocrystals. (Left) The atomic structure of nanocrystals before contact. (Right) The pseudo-elastic mechanism in action (1 to 8). In order to demonstrate the mechanism, only some of the atoms necessary for the process are shown. One can see that during the process of adhering, many defects are created (the atoms appear in dark grey in pictures 3-7), but at the end, the nanocrystals do not exhibit any defects (8). Illustration: Technion Spokesman.

The Technion is in 42^nd place in Engineering and Technology

Computer science at the Technion was ranked as 15^th in the world (among 500 universities) by the respected Shanghai Ranking published this week. Shanghai Jiaotong University published its list of university rankings – considered especially prestigious and reliable – http://www.shanghairanking.com/index.html. Harvard University tops the list, with MIT heading the engineering and technology rankings.

The Technion is ranked 42^nd in the world in engineering and technology and among the 75 leading universities in life sciences, mathematics and chemistry.

The Shanghai Ranking debuted in 2003 and is intended to improve the level of Chinese universities by comparing them to the top 500 universities in the world. The ranking is based on objective criteria and numerous data. Among the criteria – the number of Nobel Prize and other prestigious award winners, the number of scientific papers published in the leading journals – Nature and Science and other performance relative to the size of the university. The comprehensive Chinese research examines 1000 universities, including the top 500 ones.

Technion President, Prof. Peretz Lavie, said that the high ranking of the Technion in the computer field explains high position of the state of Israel in global high tech. “Research that is now being completed shows that Technion graduates do indeed lead the high tech sector that is moving Israel’s economy forward,” he said. “It turns out that 76% of Technion graduates in the last two decades work in the country’s high tech industry, which is responsible for 51% of the state of Israel’s industrial exports. Of these graduates, 25% are CEOs or deputy general managers, 21% hold other types of management positions, 10% are team leaders and 12.6% are involved in R&D. 59 out of 121 Israeli companies whose shares are traded on NASDAQ were established or are managed by Technion graduates.”