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.
Three Georgia Tech School of Physics students captured top honors at the annual University Physics Competition, which pits teams of international college students against each other to solve complex physics problems over a 48-hour period. Andrew McEntaggart, Adele Payman, and Aulden Jones comprised the Georgia Tech team, which was one of four gold medal-winning teams at the competition. Ed Greco is the team's faculty sponsor.
student organization hub 2021-02-10T00:00:00-05:00Georgia Tech Archivist Alison Reynolds and School of Physics astronomer and Georgia Tech Observatory director Jim Sowell lead a virtual discussion on Newton's Principia, which established the modern science of dynamics and serves as the basis for the modern study of physics, and Opticks, which provided our modern understanding of light and color.
5 questions 2021-02-03T00:00:00-05:00Here are two items that relate to David Hu's previous Georgia Tech research on the ability of fire ants to form rafts made of, well, fire ants in order to stay afloat and alive during floods. Hu, an adjunct professor in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Physics, who is also a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, took closeup photographs of the fire ants in his lab experiments with graduate student Nathan J. Mlot. Meanwhile, in the Overhead at the National Geographic podcast, photographer Anand Varma describes shooting Hu's fire ants during a separate visit to Georgia Tech. (National Geographic photos require registration.)
college of engineering; Lauren steimle; Meghan Meredith; isye; NSF; NSF grfp; graduate research 2021-02-03T00:00:00-05:00Physicist Elisabetta Matsumoto is an avid knitter and has been since taking up the hobby as a child. Matsumoto, now at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, is teasing out the mathematical rules that dictate how stitches impart such unique properties to fabrics.
University of Arizona 2021-01-26T00:00:00-05:00Each year, the University System of Georgia (USG) honors outstanding teachers and departments from its 26 member institutions with Regents Awards. Of the nine awards presented for Fiscal Year 2021, Georgia Tech took home two.
The Writing and Communication Program (WCP) won the Teaching Excellence Award for Department or Program, and School of Physics Interim Chair and Professor Michael Schatz was the unanimous choice for the Award for Excellence in Online Teaching.
Read more on Schatz's award here.
Professional Master's in public safety and occupational health 2021-01-14T00:00:00-05:00For the graduate students and researchers coming to the United States from other countries, the opportunity to study at Georgia Tech is invaluable. But for the spouses who come along with them, it can be a lonely struggle. This feature on the Georgia Tech International Spouses' Group, which provides support for wives and husbands of Institute scientists, features a couple working in the lab of Flavio Fenton, professor in the School of Physics.
We’re not just spouses: Stories of international spouses at Georgia Tech 2021-01-13T00:00:00-05:00Martin Mourigal, associate professor in the School of Physics, gives Redac France Culture and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development an overview of Georgia Tech's Covid-19 testing and surveillance system. (Note: French langauge content.)
Elijah (Eli) Mehlferber 2021-01-12T00:00:00-05:00That's the title of a recently-published biography written by Andrew Zangwill, professor in the School of Physics. Nobel Prize-winner Philip Anderson was considered one of the most influential physicists of the late 20th century, helping to put condensed matter physics on the scientific map. Zangwill also presented a 73-minute virtual lecture on his findings on Anderson in October 2020. It can be found here on the Georgia Tech MediaSpace site.
Storage Farms 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00The famous Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the site of many astronomical accomplishments, including the discovery of the whirling stars known as pulsars, collapsed in early December. Georgia Tech scientists John Wise and Emily Alicea-Munoz, both with the School of Physics, shared their special memories of Arecibo for Puerto Rican television. (Note: the television feature is in Spanish.)
fossil fridays 2020-12-13T00:00:00-05:00This paper refined the current understanding of how fish navigate their underwater world could provide insights that can be applied to underwater robots, according to Science News. Robots are often designed with separate apparatus for movement and sensing, but, as Simon Sponberg, a biophysicist at the Georgia Tech, tells Science News, “biology puts sensors on everything.”
Pranav Kulkarni 2020-11-09T00:00:00-05:00Luckily, a team of researchers from Georgia Tech's Center for Relativistic Astrophysics recently conducted simulations that show what the formation of the first stars looked like. The study that describes their findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, was led by Gen Chiaki and John Wise – a post-doctoral researcher and associate professor from the CfRA (respectively).
Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy 2020-11-08T00:00:00-05:00Physicists and biologists challenge a prevailing evolutionary theory that single-celled organisms can only evolve to become multicellular life forms if doing so increases their overall productivity.
“Rather than each cell producing what it needs, specialised cells need to be able to trade with each other. Previous work suggests that this only happens as long as the overall group’s productivity keeps increasing,” explains lead author David Yanni, PhD student at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US.
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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
