Moti Heiblum

Mordehai Heiblum ( – sometimes called Moty Heiblum, born May 25, 1947, in Holon) is an Israeli electrical engineer and condensed matter physicist, known for his research in mesoscopic physics. His experimental techniques allowed to demonstrate the fractional charge of the fractional quantum Hall effect and measuring the of half-integer thermal conductance quantum at filling fraction 5/2. For these discoveries he earned several prizes, including the 2025 Wolf Prize in Physics. Biography Moty Heiblum was born and raised in Holon. His mother was the only Holocaust survivor in her immediate family, and most of his father's family perished in the Holocaust. From 1967 to 1971 Moty Heiblum served in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) in the IDF Communications Corps and was an instructor at the IDF Air Force Technical School. Heiblum graduated in electrical engineering from the Technion with a bachelor's degree in 1973 and from Carnegie-Mellon University with a master's degree in 1974. He received in 1978 his Ph.D. with thesis Characteristics of metal-oxide-metal devices supervised by John Roy Whinnery. After completing his Ph.D., Heiblum joined the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. The initial investment for the Submicron Center was approximately $16 million. Heiblum has headed the Submicron Center since its founding in 1990. That same year he was appointed a full professor at the Weizmann Institute. He established the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the Weizmann Institute and was its first director from 1993 to 1996 and from 2007 to 2012 he was again its director. In 2000 he was appointed to the Alex and Ida Susan Professorial Chair of Submicron Studies.

From 1991 to 1992, Heiblum headed a government committee that advised the Minister of Science on how to encourage the microelectronics industry in the State of Israel. Since 2001, he has chaired the board of directors of Braude College of Engineering. From 1993 to 1996, he was a visiting professor for several weeks each summer at the Vienna University of Technology. From 1996 to 1997 he was on sabbatical as a visiting professor at Stanford University in combination with Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California. He was an editor for the journal Semiconductor Science and Technology and is now an editor for the journal Solid State Communications. He organized and conducted, in collaboration with Professor Elisha Cohen of the Technion, the 1998 International Conference of Semiconductors, which was attended by about 1,100 people and held in Jerusalem.

His doctoral students include Amir Yacoby, graduated in 1994. and a member of Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2008). In 2008, he received the Rothschild Prize in physics.

Family Moty Heiblum's wife Rachel has a PhD in biology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She worked in the Faculty of Agriculture of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Rehovot campus. They have four children. He has a younger brother, Zohar Heiblum, who is a director, manager, turn-around specialist, and investor in the high-tech industry.

Selected publications