ABOUT ME
I am a theoretical physicist investigating the Early Universe. I strive to understand physical processes that occurred in the split second after the Big Bang, See more below.
I am currently a Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics at Ariel University.
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I was born in Tel-Aviv and grew up in Herzelia, a town 10 km north of Tel-Aviv. I currently live in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel.
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My main hobbies are hiking, reading and American Football, that I watch and play:
https://www.facebook.com/JerusalemLions/
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The name Ido is the name of a biblical prophet, and Ben-Dayan means in Hebrew "Son of a Judge" and has ran in the family of Aleppo Jews for many generations.
EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Early Universe Physics
Modern Cosmology along with our current knowledge of Particle Physics allows to trace the evolution of the Universe all the way back to nucleosynthesis, the era when light elements such as hydrogen, helium and others were formed. Our knowledge of what happened prior to nucleosynthesis is less satisfactory. From the Big Bang to nucleosynthesis, we expect several fascinating phenomena to have taken place. These include: Inflation, a period of accelerated expansion that accounts for the high level of isotropy and small anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). Reheating - the population of the Universe with Standard Model particles, various phase transitions. Baryogenesis - Why is the Universe made of matter and not antimatter? Such questions require the use of Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity techniques, and confrontation with observational data. In our research we investigate these phenomena and suggest observational signatures that can confirm or rule out various models. Furthermore, Cosmology is not a controlled lab experiment. We therefore analyze the possible systematic errors that can arise in various observations, and suggest how to incorporate them in the analysis, and suggest new cosmological probes that avoid such systematic errors. Last, we seek a resolution of the largest question of all - The Big Bang! Was there a Big Bang at all or just a Big Bounce? How can we describe Physics approaching the Big Bang? What are the observational implications of various alternatives?
1999-2002
B.Sc. Physics (major) and Math
Tel-Aviv University
General Relativity
General Relativity (GR) is a theory of gravity suggested by Einstein in 1915. It has passed all experimental tests with flying colors, including the recent detection of gravitational waves. Several "shortcomings" are the need for "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" or a "Cosmological Constant" to explain the observational data. Furthermore, at the Planck scale, quantum gravity effects become dominant and GR loses its validity. In the realm of classical physics, GR is a classical non-linear field theory, and as such, small scale non-linearities might have crucial effects on global scale, at least from the mathematical point of view. We try to understand the role of these non-linearities in Cosmology, and in general non-linear field theories.
Particle Physics​
Interactions of fundamental particles are described by the celebrated Standard Model of fundamental particles (SM). The SM accounts for all known experimental terrestrial results except masses of Neutrinos. However, regarding Cosmology, it fails to account for inflation, dark matter and the Cosmological Constant (CC). Additionally it has several "hierarchy problems": The value of the CC, the Higgs mass, and the absence of a large CP phase in the sector of strong interactions does not fit our current understanding of quantum field theory. We are investigating various solutions to these hierarchy problems and their experimental consequences.
2003 - 2005
M.Sc. Physics, "Leptogenesis from bilinear R-parity violating couplings"
Weizmann Institute of Science
2006 - 2011
Ph.D. Physics, "Inflationary Aspects of Superstring Cosmology"
Ben-Gurion University
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2011 - 2012
Joint postdoc at CITA and Perimeter Institute
2012 - 2015
Postdoc at DESY
Hosts: Alexander Westphal and Jan Louis
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2015 - 2017
Prat postdoctoral fellow at Ben-Gurion University
String Theory
String theory is the leading candidate of a quantum gravity theory. Many of the problems described above such as Inflation, the CC, and the Big Bang, are sensitive to the underlying quantum gravity theory, or (almost) completely rely on such theory for a resolution. We are therefore interested in embedding our solutions to the above problems in string theory, where in principle one can account for quantum gravity effects and their role in the validity of these solutions.