Occasionally, Ose Hen, who recently took over as an associate professor of physics at MIT, will refer to a file he’s kept since high school.
The file is a comprehensive assessment of Hen’s learning disabilities stemming from dysgraphia – a neurological condition in which one has difficulty translating their thoughts into written form. Hen was diagnosed with a severe case of dysgraphia as a kindergartener. In high school, due to an administrative problem, the school was unaware of his condition and, without adequate support, Hen failed most classes. Only when a teacher showed a particular interest was Hen sent for a detailed assessment of his learning abilities.
That review, which Hen didn’t read until later, when he was well into his undergraduate degree in physics, was a revelation and validation to him.
“I saw a lot of ‘he’s bad at this, and not good at that,’ and went through all the things I failed at,” Hen recalls. “But there was one test where I did exceptionally well, and which they braved.”
It was a test of nonverbal thinking, or abstract comprehension, assessing Hen’s ability to conceptually reduce complex ideas to their basic essence. On this test, Hen scored in the 99th percentile. Fittingly, by the time Hen read this, he was already immersed in studies of abstract concepts and systems in nuclear physics. Alone, he was drawn to a field suited to his powers. Reading the appraisal gave him confidence in his instincts.
“They wrote that ‘this ability is particularly strong in him and you need to push him to areas that use it,'” says Hen.
He brings this to the students at MIT today, not as a brag, but as a guide.
“I try to emphasize that there is more than one path to success,” says Hen. “Try to think about what you’re good at, and then do the hard work of figuring out what area, group, subfield, could use it. Find the thing you brought that was unique and build on that. Because then you really shine.”
Today, Hen and his research group are investigating the inner workings of the nucleus, the interactions between protons and neutrons, and their even smaller components quarks and gluons, which are the basic building blocks that hold together all visible matter in the universe. universe. Hen looks for connections between how these particles behave and how their interactions shape the visible universe and extreme astrophysical phenomena like neutron stars.
“A lot of physics, in my mind, is taking complex systems with a lot of detail and abstracting away the details to look for the main principles that drive everything,” he says.
A frontier of ideas
Hen grew up in the countryside of Jerusalem, Israel, as part of a moshav – a small Jewish village where his family worked as farmers, raising chickens for their eggs. In kindergarten, once Hen was diagnosed with dysgraphia, his parents sought every resource available to help him with his writing.
“I think my mother’s entire salary went to remedial tuition,” Hen recalls.
In high school, after records of his condition were transferred to the school and an assessment of his abilities was made, Hen was given permission to take oral exams. Instead of writing down his answers, he sat down with a teacher and talked. To this day, he attributes his outspoken nature to those early, formative years.
“Everyone who knows me knows I talk a lot,” says Hen. “And part of that was how I was able to learn by talking about the material.”
However, once he was able to resolve his dysgraphia, Hen soon became bored with the content of his lessons, and in high school, he routinely skipped class. A teacher, seeing his potential, told his parents about an outreach program at nearby Hebrew University, which Hen’s teacher felt could challenge the boy in ways high school couldn’t.
In her last two years of high school, Hen participated in the program and enrolled in several university programming classes, which she quickly picked up. After graduation, he attended Hebrew University full-time, double majoring in computer engineering and physics—a subject he thought he might like, since his older brother had also majored in the subject.
One class, early in his freshman year, was particularly motivating. The class explored ideas in modern physics, and students heard from different physicists about the concepts and phenomena they were dealing with at the time.
“It showed us that starting our studies can be difficult and annoying, but that’s what you’re working for,” says Hen. “In that class, we learned about quantum mechanics, nonlinear solids, and astrophysics, and it just gave us a glimpse of the frontier of the field.”
Essentially
After completing his university degree, Hen joined the Israel Defense Forces, which is mandatory service for all Israeli citizens. He spent seven years in the army, working as a researcher in a physics laboratory.
Along with his military service, Hen was also pursuing a doctorate in physics and would make the short commute to Tel-Aviv University once a week and on weekends to work on his degree. There, he met a strange and loving professor who took a chance on Hen and offered him a rare opportunity: to travel to the United States to help build a new particle detector. The detector would be based at Jefferson Laboratory, a facility funded by the US Department of Energy that houses a large particle accelerator designed to collide beams of electrons with various atomic nuclei.
With a particle detector, physicists can essentially take pictures of a collision and its aftermath, to reveal the subatomic components and their properties, and how they interact to create the nuclear structure of an atom.
Hen spent a summer at the facility, helping to build a neutron detector that physicists hoped would shed light on “short-range correlations”—extremely short, quantum-mechanical fluctuations that can occur between a few protons and neutrons inside the nucleus of an atom. When these particles come close enough to touch each other, their interactions become stronger, even if only for a moment before they drift apart. These short-range correlations are thought to be the source of most of the kinetic energy in a nucleus, which itself is the basis of all visible matter in the universe.
“More than half of the kinetic energy in a nucleus comes from these strange states,” says Hen. “If you ever want to understand atomic nuclei and visible matter at its core, you must also understand short-range correlations.”
Helping to build the neutron detector was an enjoyable combination of hands-on work and abstract thinking, and from then on, Hen was associated with experimental nuclear physics.
After completing his PhD and a thesis on short-range correlations, Hen headed to MIT, where he interviewed for a postdoc position as a Pappalardo Fellow at the Laboratory of Nuclear Sciences. As he talked to one person after another, he eventually found himself in the office of then-department head Peter Fisher, who encouraged Hen to also apply for an open faculty position.
A few months later, in 2015, he found himself in the fortunate position of starting at MIT as a postdoc, having already accepted a position on the new faculty he would start at MIT 18 months later.
“MIT made a bet on me,” he says. “That’s the unique thing about MIT. They saw something in me that I didn’t see then and supported me.”
Particle connections
In his first years on campus, Hen continued his work on short-range correlations. His group used data from particle accelerators around the world to develop a universal understanding of short-range correlations in a way that can be applied at many scales. For example, it can predict how interactions will determine correlations in one type of atom versus another, and shape the behavior of much more dense and extreme phenomena such as neutron stars.
Chicken also expanded into the field of neutrinos, which are nearly massless particles that are the most abundant particles in the universe. The properties of neutrinos are thought to be the key to the origin of matter, although neutrinos are extremely difficult to study in detail because their detection requires a detailed understanding of their interaction with atomic nuclei. Hen discovered that, rather than depending on the neutrino’s elusive interactions, there might be a way to abstract that behavior into that of a more distinct particle, to better understand the neutrino itself.
By analyzing data from electron beam accelerators around the world, his group founded the “electron-to-neutrino” effort, which developed a framework that essentially transposed the interactions of an electron to describe how a neutrino would behave in similar circumstances – a tool. that will help physicists interpret data from hard-to-find neutrino experiments.
Reflecting on how he determines which direction to take his research, Hen says: “I have a big nose and I like to talk to people and understand what they are doing and whether I can do something there or not . I like to build communities, bring people of different abilities and make something big together, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
Great science
Hen had a chance to start a major scientific collaboration as part of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a concept for a particle accelerator that collides electrons with protons, neutrons and nuclei to study the internal structures of particles and how they are held together by the “strong nuclear force”, which is known as the strongest force in nature.
In late 2019, the EIC was the focus of a meeting at MIT in which physicists from around the world gathered to discuss the project’s recent approval, granted by the US Department of Energy (DoE). The next step was to design a detector, and multiple versions were considered. Hen, who stopped by out of curiosity, ended up joining a community-wide effort to develop a menu of potential detectors that could be built at the EIC.
Hen then took a leading role in the next step to submit a specific detector design for DoE funding. Working closely with physicists Tanja Horn and John Lajoie, they called on experts to join the effort, eventually bringing together physicists from 98 institutions. Thanks to their collaborative efforts, the DoE ultimately chose their design over a competitor. Hen and his colleagues then turned to that other group to join forces to further develop and fine-tune the design.
“We combined our strengths,” says Hen. “We’re doing great science. And when you do great science, there’s a lot of talented people involved. I’ve learned through this process that it’s all about how you interact with people and adapt yourself to doing science, together.”
Today, Hen is overseeing aspects of the EIC scientific community that are leading its development, which is expected to break ground in the coming years. In the meantime, he continues to expand the projects in his research group and works to mentor his students and postdocs, just as he was supported during his early career.
“I’m a very lucky person because I had so many mentors in my life, and they all believed in me and saw things that I didn’t see,” says Hen. “They noticed that I’m different in whatever capacity and tried to squeeze that lemon out. That was a big thing for me.”