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 Georgia Tech honors graduate who was both a Rhodes and Truman Scholar may have a chance to impact the purchase of new technologies for the Air Force. William Roper, currently founding director of the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office, is President Trump's nominee to be assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisitions. Roper, who has argued that the Defense Department should use more commercial software, graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. from the School of Physics in 2001. He earned his M.S. in physics from Tech in 2002, also summa cum laude. Roper has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Oxford.
digital divide 2018-01-03T00:00:00-05:00Yes, last year's detection of neutron stars colliding was indeed "kind of a big deal," especially here at Georgia Tech. Seventeen of our faculty members, researchers, and students were part of the international Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory team that detected the first-ever observation of a kilonova, or neutron star mashup. LIGO Deputy Spokesperson Laura Cadonati, quoted in this story, is also a professor in the School of Physics. (This Newsweek story is essentially a recap of a Science magazine item that named LIGO's discovery as Breakthrough of the Year.)
Elizabeth Kornegay 2017-12-22T00:00:00-05:00The school year started with a total solar eclipse that captivated thousands on Tech Green. For some schools, that would be enough to qualify for a memorable year. But this is Georgia Tech, and events before and after Aug. 21's celestial happening also put a spotlight on the Institute. In addition to the eclipse watch party on campus, the College of Science's contributions to this list of top Tech news stories for the year includes gravitational waves from neutron star collisions, golden nanorods used to fight cancer, robots for exploring frozen moons of Jupiter, and a Rhodes Scholar in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Philonise Floyd 2017-12-22T00:00:00-05:00The organization known as the "world's largest general scientific society" has elected three Georgia Tech researchers as fellows for 2017. The American Association for the Advancement of Science has singled out Joshua Weitz, professor in the School of Biological Sciences; Baratunde Cola, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering; and Mary Frank Fox, ADVANCE professor in the School of Public Policy. Weitz was honored for his research on the effects of viruses on populations and ecosystems. Weitz is also an adjunct assistant professor in the School of Physics, and director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences.
Elaine M. Hubbard Endowed Chair in the School of Mathematics 2017-12-04T00:00:00-05:00Celeste Headlee, host of Georgia Public Broadcasting's On Second Thought radio program, interviews School of Physics Professor Laura Cadonati, and postdoctoral researcher James Clark, about the recent neutron star collision discovered by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Georgia Tech has 17 postdoctoral researchers, faculty members, and students working with LIGO. Cadonati is LIGO's deputy spokesperson.
Whistle Bistro 2017-11-01T00:00:00-04:00
Here is how the Associated Press reported Monday's announcement from the LIGO Scientific Collaboration that scientists had detected the collision of two neutron stars. Laura Cadonati, professor in the School of Physics and LIGO deputy spokesperson, is quoted in the article. Cadonati is also with the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics.
management of technology and innovation 2017-10-17T00:00:00-04:00
The Washington Post publishes its report on the news that the LIGO Scientific Collaboration has detected a kilonova, the collision of two neutron stars. The burst rippled the fabric of space-time and sent gamma-rays and gold flying through the cosmos. School of Physics Professor Laura Cadonati, who is also LIGO's deputy spokesperson, is quoted in the article as saying that scientists feel like "we have hit the motherlode."
cohort 2017-10-16T00:00:00-04:00
Here is how the Los Angeles Times broke the news of the first-ever detection of a neutron star collision and how the celestial event was confirmed by scientists and astronomers around the world. Laura Cadonati, professor in the School of Physics and deputy spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, is quoted in the article.
partner institutions 2017-10-16T00:00:00-04:00
"This is the first time we had a 3D IMAX view of an astronomical event," says Laura Cadonati, professor in the School of Physics and deputy spokeperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. She's referring to more than 70 observatories around the world that helped confirm the first-ever detection of gravitational waves and light caused by the merger of two neutron stars. The resulting explosion and lightshow those astronomers witnessed from the merger is called a kilonova, and it's the source of Earth's heavy elements like gold, silver, and platinum.
sustainability award 2017-10-16T00:00:00-04:00Welcome to the era of multi-messenger astrophysics – a single event in the cosmos that gives off both gravitational and electromagnetic waves. That's what the Aug. 17, 2017, detection by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration of two neutron stars merging means for the scientific community, which is celebrating yet another discovery that confirms a century-old theory from Albert Einstein. Once again, School of Physics Professor Laura Cadonati, LIGO's deputy spokesperson, is proving to be very quotable. "We can now fill in a few more tiles in the jigsaw puzzle that is the story of our universe," Cadonati tells CNN.
McMillan Street 2017-10-16T00:00:00-04:00The first-ever detection of gravitational waves and light from the collision of two neutron stars isn't just setting the scientific community ablaze. It also ushers in a new "multi-messenger" astronomy, with scientists arround the world gathering and studying those waves, light, and subatomic particles at the same time. So says Laura Cadonati, professor in the School of Physics and the deputy spokesperson for the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Scientific Collaboration, and she explains the significance of this new era. Cadonati is also a member of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics.
work family interactions 2017-10-16T00:00:00-04:00The Aug.17, 2017, detection of gravitational waves and light from the merger of two neutron stars set off a race against time around the globe. Astronomers scrambled to confirm data that could be seen by telescopes and measured by gamma-ray, x-ray and radio wave detection equipment before they all faded away. Laura Cadonati, associate professor in the School of Physics and LIGO Scientific Collaboration deputy spokesperson, explains how these gravitational waves lasted longer than those from four previous incidents caused by black hole collisions. Cadonati is a member of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics.
advice for students 2017-10-16T00:00:00-04:00
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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
