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.
Fire ants build living rafts to survive floods and rainy seasons. Georgia Tech scientists are studying if a fire ant colony’s ability to respond to changes in their environment during a flood is an instinctual behavior and how fluid forces make them respond. Hungtang Ko and David Hu will present the science behind this insect behavior, focusing their discussion on how the living raft changes size under various environmental conditions at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics 72nd Annual Meeting on Nov. 26.
Peter Lott 2019-11-26T00:00:00-05:00Yes, space is vast, infinite, and no doubt very cold. But does it ever reach absolute zero, which is -459°F? Popular Mechanics examines that possibility and gets some expert analysis from two School of Physics researchers: Jim Sowell, academic professional and director of the Georgia Tech Observatory, and Alastair Gent, graduate student in the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics.
campus construcation 2019-11-22T00:00:00-05:00A new study from Georgia Tech astrophysicists Billy Quarles and Gongjie Li may have you seeing double — as in twin suns hovering over an alien exoplanet landscape. The researchers placed a (theoretical) duplicate of Earth inside so-called binary, or two-star, systems, and ran simulations on planetary axis tilts. The results indicate the planets would have tilts similar to Earth's, which bodes well for habitable climates that could potentially support alien life. There are a lot of multiple-star systems out there, so the study may boost the number of exoplanets that could harbor life. In addition to this CNET story, the study has also been covered in Daily Mail Online, King5 News in Seattle, and Express.co.uk. Li is an assistant professor in the School of Physics, while Quarles, the study's principal investigator, is a research scientist in Li's lab.
Raphael Warnock 2019-11-20T00:00:00-05:00For all science has learned about black holes in the last decade, researchers had only really estabished two different sizes for these celestial phenomena — stellar, or five to 50 times greater than the size of our sun, and supermassive, or a million times greater than our nearby star. Nothing had been found in-between. New research from a team including current and former Georgia Tech scientists could shed new light on intermediate-size black holes. Using a new method of observation called multiband gravitational wave astronomy that spans a wider range of wave frequencies, the new study picks up where LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) left off in 2016 with the discovery of evidence of gravitational waves. A handful of Georgia Tech scientists and students were part of that international Nobel Prize-winning effort, including study co-authors Deirdre Shoemaker, professor in the School of Physics, and Karan Jani, who received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Georgia Tech and is now at Vanderbilt University.
Kausik Chakrabarti 2019-11-18T00:00:00-05:00
[I]f a promising Army project proves out, a future soldier might deploy a host of “shape-shifting” particles that form themselves into whatever they need to accomplish the mission. That would include a robotic swarm that could become its own bridge to cross a river before reforming into another shape for the next phase of the mission, one official said....Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Northwestern University have taken a new approach to robot building, using “smarticles” that could lead to new ways for robots to move, according to an Army release. “People have been interested in making a certain kind of swarm robots that are composed of other robots,” said Dan Goldman, a physics professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. “These structures could be reconfigured on demand to meet specific needs by tweaking their geometry.”
biosignal processing 2019-10-25T00:00:00-04:00Ants are notoriously much better than humans at organizing their collective traffic flow when foraging for food, but how they manage to do so isn't fully understood...Last year, physicist Daniel Goldman's lab at Georgia Tech studied how fire ants optimize their tunnel digging. Those tunnels are narrow, with barely enough room for two ants to pass, yet jams rarely happened. When an ant encounters a tunnel in which other ants are already working, it retreats to find another tunnel. It also helps that only a fraction of the colony is digging at any given time: 30% of them do 70% of the work.
Study: Ants are “immune” to traffic jams 2019-10-23T00:00:00-04:00Researchers are investigating a different kind of retinal prosthesis made from semiconductive polymers, a class of carbon-based plastics that can conduct electricity in much the same way that silicon microchips do.These polymers are best known for their use in some types of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays, the richly colored screens found in millions of smartphones. But the materials also show promise for a new generation of cheap, flexible, lightweight solar cells. And they show even more promise as soft, flexible bioelectronic interfaces to living tissue — “one of the emerging and very exciting applications of organic semiconductors,” says Carlos Silva, a physicist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. These applications include drug delivery and biosensors.
Chooz nuclear plant 2019-10-22T00:00:00-04:00Shapeshifters were once the basis for far-fetched science fiction drama. They are now on the outskirts of robot-based research being performed by the U.S. Army and associates, including the Georgia Institute of Technology and Northwestern University with their work published their findings in the technical journal Science Robotics....“These are very rudimentary robots whose behavior is dominated by mechanics and the laws of physics,” said Dan Goldman, a Dunn Family professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the project’s principal investigator.
Online Master's of Science in Cybersecurity 2019-10-07T00:00:00-04:00The benefits of smart cities and an increasingly connected world are much-discussed. But the convenience, energy efficiency, automation, and personalized experience of internet-connected homes, cars, offices, and cities also invites security threats that are just beginning to be understood, and many that have yet to be discovered....“Unlike most of the data breaches we hear about, hacked cars have physical consequences,” says Peter Yunker, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics and co-lead on the study.
Regents’ Entrepreneurx 2019-09-28T00:00:00-04:00Good news for small, helpless robots who long to be a part of something bigger: Researchers have found a way to create “robots made of robots” that can move around, even though the individual parts can’t travel on their own. To create this robot horde, researchers designed several roughly iPhone-size machines called “smarticles”—short for smart particles—that could flap their small arms up and down but could not move from place to place by themselves. They then put five of the smarticles in a plastic ring. This group of robots—which the researchers call a “supersmarticle”—could move by itself in random directions as the individual smarticles collided with each other. Among the researchers is Dan Goldman, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics. Other coverage of the work may be found at Institution of Mechanical Engineers, The Engineer, IEEE Spectrum, Futurity.org, Science Times, Popular Mechanics, and The NewStack.
sustainability award 2019-09-18T00:00:00-04:00Georgia Tech researchers have developed a measurement that should help robot-makers improve how much control their bots have over their movement. Their findings appear in the August issue of the journal Nature Communications. It works a bit like this: a cockroach has a highly attuned central nervous system coordinating its movement - as a Georgia Tech article about the research described it, "neurological signals guiding six impeccably evolved legs." A stick bug's legs function more independently, reacting to the environment as it moves. The work was carried out in the lab of Simon Sponberg. It was also featured in IEEE Spectrum.
Georgia Tech researchers use cockroaches to help robots move better 2019-08-30T00:00:00-04:00The most important part of one of the most precise clocks in the world is a paper-thin, staple-size piece of lutetium. ... Murray Barrett didn’t aspire to be a clockmaker. After completing his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech in 2002, where he studied atomic physics, he did a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at NIST in the quantum computing and information program. Barrett did his Ph.D. under the direction of Michael Chapman.
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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
