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.
“We can’t see the very first generations of stars,” said study co-author John Wise, an associate professor at the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Tech. “Therefore, it’s important to actually look at these living fossils from the early universe, because they have the fingerprints of the first stars all over them through the chemicals that were produced in the supernova from the first stars.”
Brett Aiello 2020-10-29T00:00:00-04:00"We performed simulations of black-hole collisions using supercomputers and then compared the rapidly changing shape of the remnant black hole to the gravitational waves it emits." Christopher Evans, co-author and graduate student from the Georgia Institute of Technology, said.
Read more:
Ars Technica
Futurism
Far outside our solar system and out past the distant reachers of our galaxy—in the vast nothingness of space—the distance between gas and dust particles grows, limiting their ability to transfer heat. There may be pockets of the universe where temperatures drop to 1 Kelvin above absolute zero, astronomer Jim Sowell of the Georgia Institute of Technology notes, but so far, the closest measurement to absolute zero has only been observed in laboratories here on Earth.
campus construcation 2020-09-25T00:00:00-04:00It was a long and storied path for Dr. James “Jim” Sowell to get the 20-inch, Italian Officina Stellare telescope installed on the roof of the Howey Physics Building. But he succeeded, and today during Public Nights, young stargazers not only have access to Georgia Tech’s Observatory, they’re also learning about the solar system, stars, galaxies, and the universe, as well as astro-particle, electromagnetic, gravitational, and stellar astrophysics.
Karthik Sundaresan 2020-09-23T00:00:00-04:00Georgia Tech physicist Jennifer Rieser, who studies snake slithering, but was not involved in this new study, tells NPR that the research is a “cool” finding. The paper provides evidence that the way the snake moves in the air "actually seems to have a pretty important consequence for their movement,” she says. Related coverage: NPR.
Pranav Kulkarni 2020-07-02T00:00:00-04:00In a study published in Heart Rhythm on May 28, researchers led by Favio Fenton at Georgia Institute of Technology detailed how the drug affects electrical signaling in the heart of rabbits and guinea pig, and contributes to abnormal heart rhythms; these animals serve as model for understanding heart issues in humans.
EarSketch; code; computer science; CEISMC; School of Music; School of Literature 2020-06-04T00:00:00-04:00The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which has been promoted as a potential treatment for Covid-19, is known to have potentially serious effects on heart rhythms. Now, corresponding author Flavio Fenton and a team of researchers have used an optical mapping system to observe exactly how the drug creates serious disturbances in the electrical signals that govern heartbeat. Related coverage: Research Horizons, ScienceDaily, Futurity, The Doctor's Channel, Cardiac Rhythm News.
resilient mindset 2020-06-01T00:00:00-04:00A choreography of swimming, walking and rolling could help future rovers, built by Daniel Goldman's lab, avoid getting stuck in loose soil on the moon or Mars. Also featured on CNN, Science News, Inside Science, AAAS, Space.com, Daily Mail, Inverse, IEEE Spectrum, IHS Engineering360, Stars and Stripes.
Extension of Self 2020-05-14T00:00:00-04:00The "Mini Rover," a scaled down 3D-printed model of a NASA rover concept, has a gait that allows it to crawl and successfully conquer tricky terrain.
McMillan Street 2020-05-14T00:00:00-04:00To make fried rice like a pro, use physics. New research by David Hu and Hungtang Ko has analyzed the repetitive movements used to toss the rice.
Read more:
Gizmodo
ZME Science
Science News
ARS Technica
Forbes
American Council on Science and Health
Lifehacker Australia
Atlanta Journal Constitution
Simon Sponberg is back to experimenting with some of his favorite subjects: Hawkmoths. The School of Physics and School of Biological Sciences assistant professor, who studies the neuromechanics of animal movement, has tethered the large moths to video game joysticks in earlier studies to find out how the insects track targets. Now he's gathering data about just how fast the moths decide on which muscles to use as they hover near flowers. Sponberg's latest study also attracted the attention of The Scientist.
reconfigurable transceivers 2019-12-30T00:00:00-05:00Many things about the animal world fascinate David Hu. He's won awards and gained attention for his studies on everything from mammal urination and defecation, to this research involving fire ants and how they build rafts out of their bodies when floodwaters rise. Hu, an associate professor in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Physics, and his team found different fluid behaviors, such as vortexes, could change the size of the fire ant raft in several ways. Hu and members of his team presented at the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics 72nd Annual Meeting in late November.
trauma recall 2019-12-20T00:00:00-05:00- ‹ previous
- 13 of 23
- next ›
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
