To request a media interview, please reach out to School of Physics experts using our faculty directory, or contact Jess Hunt-Ralston, College of Sciences communications director. A list of faculty experts and research areas across the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech is also available to journalists upon request.
A snake-like robot has been developed that can burrow through sand or loose soil. Researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara & Georgia Institute of Technology have taken their cues from plants & animals that have evolved to navigate subterranean spaces. They say they have "developed a fast, controllable soft robot that can burrow through sand.” The team is working on a project with NASA to develop burrowing for the moon or even more distant bodies, like Enceladus, a moon of Jupiter. The Geogia Tech researchers, all from the School of Physics, include Dunn Family Professor Dan Goldman, former undergraduate research assistant Mason Murray-Cooper, postdoctoral researcher Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, and research engineer Enes Aydin.
stick-slip motion 2021-06-18T00:00:00-04:00Researchers from Georgia Tech and the University of Tennessee–Knoxville uncovered hidden and unexpected quantum behavior in a rather simple iron-iodide material (FeI2) that was discovered almost a century ago. The new research insights into the material's behavior were enabled using a combination of neutron scattering experiments and theoretical physics calculations at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The team's findings—published in the journal Nature Physics—solves a 40-year-old puzzle about the material's mysterious behavior and could be used as a map to unlock a treasure trove of quantum phenomena in other materials. The paper's lead author is Xiaojian Bai, an ORNL postdoctoral fellow who received his Ph.D. from the School of Physics. The Georgia Tech-based co-authors are Associate Professor Martin Mourigal and Postdoctoral Fellow Zhilang Dun.
Katherine Roberts 2021-05-20T00:00:00-04:00For the most part, animals don't get heart attacks — not even one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. Nonhuman animals experience other cardiac problems, but as far as scientists know, heart attacks are rare in other creatures. One of the scientists looking into this is Flavio Fenton, professor in the School of Physics, who has conducted extensive research into cardiac dynamics in humans and animals.
Do other animals get heart attacks? 2021-05-09T00:00:00-04:00A team of researchers led by Dana Randall, ADVANCE Professor in the College of Computing, and Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics, sought to show that even the simplest of robots can still accomplish tasks well beyond the capabilities of one, or even a few, of them. (This item is a reprint of a College of Sciences story on Goldman's research using "BOBbots.")
Title IX logo 2021-05-08T00:00:00-04:00Researchers from Georgia Tech have been conducting experiments designed to show the simplest of robots can still accomplish tasks. The team created a group of robots they call BOBbots, which stands for “behaving, organizing, buzzing bots.” One of the researchers in Dan Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics.
CoC Career Services; OEC; Office of Outreach Enrollment and Community; career fair 2021-05-04T00:00:00-04:00Free electron lasers (FELs), which are driven by kilometer-long linear accelerators, emit bursts of short-wavelength light lasting one quadrillionth of a second. As a result, they can act as strobe lights for viewing the fastest events in nature — atomic or molecular motion — and therefore promise to revolutionize our understanding of almost any kind of matter. New research shows how to measure the super-short bursts of high-frequency light emitted from FELs. One of the co-authors of this study is Rick Trebino, professor in the School of Physics.
FITRE 2021-04-14T00:00:00-04:00Georgia Tech's Daniel Goldman gets credit here for the idea of using a certain plant root-mimicking robot for a study on molecular and mechanical strategies that roots have for navigating through soil. The School of Physics professor knew of the robot developed by UC-Santa Barbara's Elliott Hawkes, “and realized it would make a nice model of the real biological system,” Hawkes says. Goldman joined a team of Duke University researchers on the project.
reconfigurable transceivers 2021-03-12T00:00:00-05:00A new study heralds the discovery of Gliese 486 b, an exoplanet in Earth's cosmic neighborhood with an atmosphere, which could help in the search for other primordial atmospheres around small rocky planets. The news has Inverse calling up a previous story on exoplanet research featuring Billy Quarles, a research scientist with Georgia Tech's Center for Relativistic Astrophysics.
Murder Mystery 2021-03-04T00:00:00-05:00This SciTechDaily item is a reprint of a Georgia Tech news release on School of Physics Professor Flavio Fenton and his continuing research into electric cardio signals and arrhythmias. In a study Fenton co-authored, it was found that alligator hearts don't suffer from fibrillations (irregular heartbeats) in the same way that humans do. (The title of Fenton's research paper? “Defibrillate you later, alligator; Q10 scaling and refractoriness keeps alligators from fibrillation.") The study is also highlighted in this Phys.org story.
Title IX logo 2021-02-22T00:00:00-05:00By using time-lapse footage, along with a root-like robot to test ideas, researchers at Duke University and Georgia Tech gained new insights into how and why plant root tips twirl as they grow. The Georgia Tech researchers, all from the School of Physics, are Dan Goldman, Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, and Mason Murray-Cooper.
Uriarte 2021-02-19T00:00:00-05:00Wired Magazine burrows deeper into how two Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Physics studied California blackworms' collective behavior. The idea is to see how that behavior could lead to building intelligent swarms of robots, or programmable active matter -- materials that can change shape, just like the blobs of blackworms studied by professor Dan Goldman and postdoctoral researcher Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin.
in solidarity 2021-02-17T00:00:00-05:00A new Georgia Tech study that recreated California blackworm swarming activity in simple robots is generating interest in science/engineering media outlets, including this story in Interesting Engineering. The study includes work by Dan Goldman, professor in the School of Physics. IEEE Spectrum also mentioned the study in its weekly Video Friday segment.
we lived happily during the war 2021-02-15T00:00:00-05:00- ‹ previous
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Events
In-Person Work at Georgia Tech: Hybrid Town Hall
The campus community is invited to join us for a town hall on Wednesday, May 14, from 10 to 11 a.m. to review the Institute’s phased approach toward a more in-person work model for the 2025-26 academic year.
School of Physics CM/AMO/Quantum Seminar - Dr. Chuankun Zhang
A solid-state nuclear clock using a VUV frequency comb
A solid-state nuclear clock using a VUV frequency comb
The size and complexity scaling of quantum systems from individual trapped ions to tens of thousands of atoms in optical lattices has driven major advances in precision measurement and quantum technology.
Experts in the News
Biofilms have emergent properties: traits that appear only when a system of individual items interacts. It was this emergence that attracted School of Physics Associate Professor Peter Yunker to the microbial structures. Trained in soft matter physics — the study of materials that can be structurally altered — he is interested in understanding how the interactions between individual bacteria result in the higher-order structure of a biofilm
Recently, in his lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Yunker and his team created detailed topographical maps of the three-dimensional surface of a growing biofilm. These measurements allowed them to study how a biofilm’s shape emerges from millions of infinitesimal interactions among component bacteria and their environment. In 2024 in Nature Physics, they described the biophysical laws that control the complex aggregation of bacterial cells.
The work is important, Yunker said, not only because it can help explain the staggering diversity of one of the planet’s most common life forms, but also because it may evoke life’s first, hesitant steps toward multicellularity.
Quanta Magazine 2025-04-21T00:00:00-04:00Postdoctoral researcher Aniruddha Bhattacharya and School of Physics Professor Chandra Raman have introduced a novel way to generate entanglement between photons – an essential step in building scalable quantum computers that use photons as quantum bits (qubits). Their research, published in Physical Review Letters, leverages a mathematical concept called non-Abelian quantum holonomy to entangle photons in a deterministic way without relying on strong nonlinear interactions or irrevocably probabilistic quantum measurements.
Physics World 2025-04-09T00:00:00-04:00Peter Yunker, associate professor in the School of Physics, reflects on the results of new experiments which show that cells pack in increasingly well-ordered patterns as the relative sizes of their nuclei grow.
“This research is a beautiful example of how the physics of packing is so important in biological systems,” states Yunker. He says the researchers introduce the idea that cell packing can be controlled by the relative size of the nucleus, which “is an accessible control parameter that may play important roles during development and could be used in bioengineering.”
Physics Magazine 2025-03-21T00:00:00-04:00School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada provided brief commentary on KM3NeT, a new underwater neutrino experiment that has detected what appears to be the highest-energy cosmic neutrino observed to date.
“This is clearly an interesting event. It is also very unusual,” said Taboada, spokesperson for the IceCube experiment in Antarctica. IceCube, which has a similar detector-array design as KM3NeT but is encased in ice rather than water, has detected neutrinos with energies as high as 10 PeV, but nothing in 100 PeV range. “IceCube has worked for 14 years, so it’s weird that we don’t see the same thing,” Taboada said. Taboada is not involved in the KM3Net experiment.
The KM3NeT team is aware of this weirdness. They compared the KM3-230213A event to upper limits on the neutrino flux given by IceCube and the Pierre Auger cosmic-ray experiment in Argentina. Taking those limits as given, they found that there was a 1% chance of detecting a 220-PeV neutrino during KM3NeT’s preliminary (287-day) measurement campaign.
This also appeared in Scientific American and Smithsonian Magazine.
Physics Magazine 2025-02-12T00:00:00-05:00Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and the School of Physics including Regents' Professor Thomas Orlando, Assistant Professor Karl Lang, and post-doctoral researcher Micah Schaible are among the authors of a paper recently published in Scientific Reports.
Researchers from the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech demonstrated that space weathering alterations of the surface of lunar samples at the nanoscale may provide a mechanism to distinguish lunar samples of variable surface exposure age.
Nature Scientific Reports 2025-01-02T00:00:00-05:00Despite the fact that Antarctica is extraordinarily difficult to get to, astronomers love it and have chosen it as the location for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. What could possibly make such a remote location so desirable for space science that it’s worth all that trouble?
In this article, scientists including Georgia Tech's Brandon Pries from the School of Physics explain why the South Pole is such a hotspot for astronomers. The answer? At the South Pole, you can best view neutrons and neutrinos in space.
Pries compares the benefits of the South Pole to the North Pole. “The North Pole is more difficult because ice coverage there fluctuates,” explains Pries. “There is a foundation of bedrock underneath Antarctica that serves as a solid base for the IceCube instruments.” This bedrock is also why Antarctica is home to the South Pole Telescope, a radio observatory that helped take the first ever photo of a black hole.
Popular Science 2024-09-05T00:00:00-04:00
