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.
Cockroaches don't look like the most elegant of runners as they scurry out from under the refrigerator, but they could be a model for how to make robots move really fast without tripping or falling over, according to a new paper. In their research, Georgia Tech researchers Izaak Neveln, Amoolya Tirumalai and Simon Sponberg studied 17 cockroaches and 2,982 of their strides to come up with mathematical equations and principles for how they manage to scurry as they do. Work was also described in Futurity.
Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need funding 2019-08-23T00:00:00-04:00Jump, little maggot, jump! Show the world that not only the finely muscled and strong-boned can defy gravity, but also the soft-bodied and wormy.... David Hu, a mechanical engineer at Georgia Tech who often studies animal movements but was not involved in this research, said the paper was “full of surprises,” such as the latch: “It’s a soft latch, composed of thousands of microscopic parts, that can shoot a soft larva like its being shot out of a cannon.” Hu also has appointments in the Georgia Tech Schools of Physics and of Biological Sciences.
Would never be part of any organization that would have me as a member 2019-08-08T00:00:00-04:00More and more self-driving and internet-connected vehicles are making its way to the market, which is endlessly exciting to autophiles. However, new research demonstrates how the rise of connected cars could make entire cities vulnerable to hackers. In a new study published in the journal Physical Review E, physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology, led by Peter Yunker, and from Multiscale Systems, Inc. used physics to analyze the future of automative cybersecurity. The team focused on potential hacks on vehicles, including potential mass destruction. The work received coverage also from Fox News, Daily Mail, WSB Radio, New York Post, Electronics Weekly, Smart Cities Dive, Consumer Affairs, and Secure World.
Shruti Mandhani n 2019-07-30T00:00:00-04:00Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, a pioneer in the field of mathematical physics known as chaos, died on June 30 in Manhattan. He was 74. ... During a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell, Dr. Feigenbaum was already allowing his focus to wander. “He was not very happy with the physics he was doing at that time,” said Predrag Cvitanovic, a theoretical physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Physics, who was a graduate student at Cornell at the time. “The main thing he did is he solved the New York Times crossword puzzle every morning,” Dr. Cvitanovic said. “It was just clear that he was very smart. He didn’t produce anything I was aware of.”
Extension of Self 2019-07-18T00:00:00-04:00Fire ants in Louisiana were caught on camera saving themselves from Tropical Storm Barry's floodwaters by banding together to form a raft. Jonathan Petralama, a weather reporter for Accuweather.com, was monitoring floodwaters from an overtopped levee in Plaquemines Parish when he captured video of "fire ant balls" floating in the water. ... Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology said in a 2013 study that fire ants use their jaws, small claws and adhesive pads on their legs to form into floating structures. These researchers said the "ant rafts" are strong enough to withstand waves and are able to break apart and re-link in different formations. Not mentioned in the article is that the Georgia Tech researchers are led by David Hu, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Mechanical Engineering, with appointments in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Physics.
Hungtang Ko 2019-07-15T00:00:00-04:00In a finding that’s great news for fans of Luke Skywalker’s fictional home planet Tatooine, scientists say planets in multiple-star systems may be habitable – though in keeping with Tatooine’s hardscrabble image, it may be an uphill battle. Astronomers have long known that multiple-star systems are common. “Most stars are members of binaries [other than the coolest dwarf stars],” Manfred Cuntz, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Arlington. And, as astronomers are learning, many of these binary-star systems have planets – some circling a single star, and some circling both at once. Life on these planets could have a hard go of it, however. In binary star systems, this effect can be radically stronger, says Billy Quarles, a research scientist in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, especially if the planet’s orbit doesn’t lie in the same plane as its stars’ orbits around each other. “Seasons around these binaries may be a lot more variable than on Earth,” he says. “There are times when there are no seasons, and others when seasons [are larger], on a time scale of a few tens of thousands of years.”
undergraduate leadership 2019-06-26T00:00:00-04:00A graduate of Georgia Tech has been named its next president. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports the Georgia Board of Regents voted Thursday to hire Ángel Cabrera to lead the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees. Cabrera is to start in his new post by Sept. 15. Cabrera had been president of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, since 2012. He and his wife met while both were enrolled at Georgia Tech School of Psychology. Their son recently graduated from the school. This was also covered by the Washington Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia (USG) today announced Dr. Ángel Cabrera as finalist for the Georgia Tech presidency. Cabrera is currently president of George Mason University, a top-tier research institution and the largest public university in Virginia. Cabrera is an alumnus of the School of Psychology.
Student Leadership Endowment Fund 2019-06-06T00:00:00-04:00The explosions that blew apart the universe’s first stars are shrouded in mystery. These energetic blasts are inherently difficult to recreate in computer simulations, even using modern computing power. “It’s one of the hardest physics problems out there,” says Alexander Ji, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif. Furthermore, he notes that researchers still lack an answer to a simple question: What types of stars do—and do not—explode? John Wise, a computational astrophysicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who is currently studying how metals propagated from the first generation of stars to the second, says this study has already inspired him to modify his methodology for that project. “Now we have some motivation to look at aspherical supernovae,” he says. Researchers do not yet know whether the likely aspherical explosion of the supernova preceding HE 1327-2326 was a rarity or a common occurrence. They still wonder whether the bulk of supernova explosions from the first generation were spherical or aspherical. So, though it appears they have approached a solution to one mystery about the first stars, numerous others abound.
work family interactions 2019-05-31T00:00:00-04:00"Knitting is coding," says Elisabetta Matsumoto, assistant professor in the School of Physics. She made this argument during a Boston knitting session she co-hosted in March as part of her five-year, National Science Foundation-funded effort to study the mathematics and physics behind knitting. The New York Times was there for a session that was half relaxing hobby, half scientific exploration of the patterns, topology, and geometry involved in knitting (which has been around since the 11th century) and how Matsumoto's research could lead to "programmable" fabrics.
Extension of Self 2019-05-17T00:00:00-04:00If you’ve ever been lucky enough to receive a handmade sweater as a gift...you may never have thought of your crafty relative as the engineering type. Knitters actually spend a huge amount of time planning out the structure of their creations. After all, it isn’t easy to create a three-dimensional, highly structured object from a one-dimensional strand of yarn. Textile engineers contend with dozens of competing factors like strength, elasticity, texture, and cost. While these have traditionally been relegated to the fashion industry, Dr. Elisabetta Matsumoto’s lab at Georgia Tech sees them as a rich, hitherto unexplored field of physics.
Pardyot Yadav 2019-04-24T00:00:00-04:00Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have managed to build a cascading silicon peashooter -- a smaller, more precise atomic beam collimator. The technology could be used to produce exotic quantum phenomena for scientists to study or to improve devices like atomic clocks or accelerometers, a smartphone component. "A typical device you might make out of this is a next-generation gyroscope for a precision navigation system that is independent of GPS and can be used when you're out of satellite range in a remote region or traveling in space," Chandra Raman, an associate professor of physics at Georgia Tech, said in a news release.
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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
