Congratulations to Tommer David Keidar for winning the outstanding poster award as part of the 88th annual meeting of the Israel Chemical Society. The award was given for his research on the universal linear response of the mean first-passage time.

We develop a comprehensive theory of queueing systems with service resetting, where service times depend on both the server's intrinsic slowdown and the job's inherent size. Analyzing both Poissonian and deterministic resetting policies, we derive conditions under which resetting reduces the mean service time to improve queue performance. Our results, validated through numerical simulations, highlight service resetting as an effective tool for mitigating service time fluctuations in diverse queueing scenarios.

Congratulations to Ofek Lauber Bonomo for winning the Emanuel Peled scholarship for excellent Ph.D. students. 

We introduce informed stochastic resetting, a novel strategy for enhancing molecular dynamics simulations by selectively resetting only when the reaction coordinate indicates insufficient progress. Applied to a model system and chignolin in explicit water, this approach accelerates Metadynamics simulations by 2–3 orders of magnitude. By leveraging information about reaction progress, informed resetting significantly extends the applicability of stochastic resetting for overcoming time scale limitations in molecular simulations.

We present an inference scheme of long-timescale, non-exponential, kinetics from molecular dynamics simulations accelerated by stochastic resetting. We show that resetting promotes enhanced sampling of the first-passage time distribution at short timescales but often also provides sufficient information to estimate the long-time asymptotics, which allows for kinetics inference. 

Gated first-passage processes, where completion depends on both hitting a target and satisfying additional constraints, are prevalent across various fields. Despite their significance, analytical solutions to basic problems remain unknown, e.g. the detection time of a diffusing particle by a gated interval, disk, or sphere. We elucidate the challenges posed by continuous gated first-passage processes and present a renewal framework to overcome them.

We introduce smart resetting—a strategy that leverages information to selectively reset a diffusing particle only when it benefits its progress toward a target. Our analysis demonstrates that smart resetting consistently lowers the energy cost per mean first passage time compared to regular resetting, achieving the known minimum energy cost bound for a diffusing particle regardless of the resetting rate. We extend our findings to consider nonlinear energetic cost functions and drift-diffusion processes, offering deeper insights into the interplay between information and resetting.

Congratulations to Dr. Yuval Scher for winning the 2024 Israel Chemical Society, Uri Golik Prize for an Excellent Graduate Student! The prize was awarded for pioneering contributions to chemical kinetics, single-molecule chemistry, and adsorption-desorption dynamics.

'With persistence, a drop of water hollows out the stone' goes the ancient Greek proverb. Yet, canonical percolation models do not account for interactions between a moving tracer and its environment. Recently, we have introduced the Sokoban model, which differs from this convention by allowing a tracer to push single obstacles that block its path. To test how this newfound ability affects percolation, we present an exact solution of the Sokoban model on the Bethe lattice.