Sesame - opening a source of light in the Middle East

Lecture by Eliezer Rabinovici (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) organized with the support of Paris IAS.

Presentation

SESAME is a cooperative venture by scientists and governments of the Middle East set up on the model of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Members of SESAME are Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority, and Turkey. The synchrotron, which acts in effect like a giant microscope, will be used by researchers to study everything from viruses to new drugs to novel materials. It is being constructed in Jordan and is expected to start running in 2017.
I will describe from a very personal view point how this project has come into being starting in 1995. The story will move from the CERN cafeteria through the Sinai desert to the completion of a high quality scientific electron accelerator in Jordan.

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Eliezer Rabinovici is Professor of Physics, holding the Leon H. and Ada G. Miller Chair of Science at the Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His area of research is theoretical high-energy physics, in particular quantum field theory and string theory. He was the director of the Israeli Institute for Advanced Studies from 2005 to 2012. He has been a fellow at the IAS Princeton and a visiting professor at the Michigan-Ann Arbor, Rutgers and Stanford Universities. He was awarded a Blaise Pascal International chair at Université Paris VI and ENS (2013) and the Louis Michel visiting chair at IHES, France (2015). He is the current chair of the Israeli Committee for High Energy Physics, and a member of the scientific advisory board of the Réseau français des instituts d’études avancées (RFIEA).