Double Rector’s Scientific Innovation Award

Each year, twelve lucky winners receive Bar-Ilan University’s Rector’s award for scientific innovation. This year, two of the winners hail from the Faculty of Engineering: Prof. Carmit Hazay and Dr. Tomer Lewi. “This award is a testament to your dedication, hard work, and groundbreaking contribution, each in your own field,” wrote Dr. Yossi Talyosef, the Faculty’s Chief Administrator. “Your innovative approach and commitment to promoting knowledge make a great impact on our academic community. Your work demonstrates the excellence, curiosity and creativity that are the hallmark of the Rector’s award. This is an admirable achievement that reflects your ceaseless work at breaking the boundaries of knowledge.”

Prof. Hazay was awarded for her research on zero-knowledge proofs. Over the past year, she has published several papers on this topic, which have received considerable attention at conferences. Zero-knowledge proofs prove the validity of mathematical claims without revealing the proof itself and have many applications in cryptography, blockchain, and other fields. Prof. Hazay's papers improve the concrete and asymptomatic security of various types of zero-knowledge proofs. In late 2023, a paper she co-authored, “Batchman and Robin: Batched and Non-batched Branching for Interactive ZK,” won the CCS 2023 Distinguished Paper Award. The award, given for a paper presenting a new zero-knowledge proofs system, was presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security. Another paper, published at the Theory of Cryptography Conference, received high grades and was submitted for publication in the prestigious Journal of Cryptography. This paper shows how a proof technique can be generalized to a broader set of protocols, allowing proofs with communication complexity that depends only on the size of the proved relation.

Dr. Tomer Lewi was awarded for his work on the unique optical properties of chalcogenide materials. In the past year, his research group published three articles on the subject. In the first paper, published in Laser & Photonics Reviews, Dr. Lewi’s group explored a material called Bismuth Telluride (Bi₂Te₃), and demonstrated that its refractive index is the highest ever observed for optical frequencies, peaking at n=11. This value is nearly double than the material with the second highest refractive index. Utilizing this giant refractive index, Dr. Lewi and his team successfully fabricated a nano-optical component that can compress light waves down to tenth of their wavelength, thereby proportionally increasing the spatial resolution by the same factor. In the second article, published in Nano Letters, Dr. Lewi and his team used a unique near-field measuring technique in order to map the local optical properties of nanoscale structures made from Bismuth Selenide (Bi₂Se₃), specially grown in Prof. Doron Naveh’s laboratory. Their third article, published in Nanophotonics, utilized the anomalous thermo-optical properties of lead telluride (PbTe), another chalcogenide composition, in order to combine it with Silicon and demonstrate a nanophotonic component whose optical  properties are temperature independent – as opposed to all other optical components, which are always affected by temperature changes.

Per Talyosef, “Prof. Hazay and Dr. Lewi show an admirable ability to significantly contribute to the scientific community, and the prize is an inspiration to researchers aspiring for excellences. “We are proud to have you at the Faculty of Engineering, and hope that your continued journey in scientific research will be rewarding and significant."