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 "black hole tango," the imagery in the headline for this Science story, hints at the implications of the latest news coming from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). The international team of scientists, which includes Georgia Tech faculty and students, says it has recorded evidence of a third black hole collision and the gravitational waves it produced. "These black holes are not like two aligned tornadoes orbiting each other, but like two tilted tornadoes," says Laura Cadonati, School of Physics associate professor and LIGO deputy spokesperson, adding that the research may prompt new theories regarding how these massive collapsing stars pair up in the first place. The latest LIGO findings are also covered at Space.com and National Geographic.
sustainability award 2017-06-01T00:00:00-04:00
More than a dozen Georgia Tech faculty members, students, and postdoctoral fellows are working with the large international research team that makes up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). This is the team that made its own splash in the science world in 2015 with the first detection of a gravitational wave signal, the result of a black hole collision 1.5 billion light years from Earth. Now LIGO announces that a third gravitational wave was observed and confirmed in January from even farther away: about 3 billion light years. Once again, Albert Einstein has been proven right, and once again the science media can't resist a story that features black holes acting mysteriously and ripples of space and time flying through the cosmos at lightspeed. In addition to this USA Today story, coverage includes the Washington Post, BBC News, Scientific American, The Verge and Phys.org, among others. School of Physics associate professor Laura Cadonati is LIGO's deputy spokesperson, and research scientist James Clark from the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics worked on the latest discovery.
sustainable fuels 2017-06-01T00:00:00-04:00
Science News is the latest stop for media coverage of David Hu and Patricia Yang's poop paper. This story contains details on how much work the researchers had to do to get information on mammal defecation, including trips to Zoo Atlanta to gather feces, and studying YouTube videos of animals pooping (are you really that surprised such videos exist?) Hu is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics and an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Yang is a Ph.D. student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.
C-130H aircraft 2017-05-11T00:00:00-04:00
This story does indeed sing the praises of the humble honeybee, focusing on special Atlanta projects designed to study and provide homes for our four-winged pollen pals. One of those is the Georgia Tech Urban Honeybee Project, located on the roof of Clough Undergraduate Learning Center. That's where Jennifer Leavey, program director and senior academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences, rules the hives. The story also mentions a recent study from School of Biological Sciences associate professor David Hu, who used the Project to research honeybee hairs and the role they play in pollen collection.
All hail the bee 2017-05-11T00:00:00-04:00Scientific American has reprinted David Hu and Patricia Yang's April 26 article from The Conversation detailing their new research on the defecation habits of mammals. (The Conversation also lists that article as one of its most read items for the past week). In addition to being an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences, Hu is also an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics and an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Yang is a Ph.D. student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.
work family interactions 2017-05-06T00:00:00-04:00An international team has discovered a way to produce graphene from ethene, also called ethylene, through a high-temperature step-by-step process. The team includes two Georgia Tech researchers who are members of the School of Physics' Center for Computational Materials Science: Bokwon Yoon, a research scientist, and professor Uzi Landman, who is also CCMS director.
Wideband Millimeter Wave Transmit 2017-05-06T00:00:00-04:00Science Daily picked up the Georgia Tech news story about the ethene-to-graphene research study, which included two members of the School of Physics' Center for Computational Materials Science: Bokwon Yoon, a research scientist, and professor Uzi Landman, who is also CCMS director.
Juneteenth Celebration 2017-05-04T00:00:00-04:00It's Vice's turn to have fun with a new study on mammal defecation provided by School of Biological Sciences associate professor David L. Hu's lab. The study found that despite a wide range of sizes in bodies and feces, most healthy mammals poop at the same rate. There is one telling behind-the-scenes detail: study co-author Patricia Yang says her team promised other graduate students sharing the lab not to bring their animal dropping samples from the Atlanta Zoo into the lab until after 5 p.m. because of the smell. Hu is also an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics and an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Yang is a Ph.D. student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.
Nathan Bowman 2017-04-28T00:00:00-04:00Why was School of Biological Sciences associate professor David Hu drawn towards mammal poop as the topic of a new study? His experience as a working dad, he recently posted on the Conversation blog, "turned me from a poo-analysis novice to a wizened connoisseur." The people running the PBS Newshour website had a chance to digest the post and decided to share it in full on their Rundown blog. Hu is also a adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics and an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Patricia Yang, a Ph.D. student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, co-authored the study, which appeared in Soft Matter.
Faculty-Led Study Abroad Programs 2017-04-27T00:00:00-04:00Everyone poops, and it takes them about the same amount of time. A new study of the hydrodynamics of defecation finds that all mammals take 12 seconds on average to relieve themselves, no matter how large or small the animal. The research, published in Soft Matter, reveals that the soft matter coming out of the hind ends of elephants, pandas, warthogs and dogs slides out of the rectum on a layer of mucus that keeps toilet time to a minimum. “The smell of body waste attracts predators, which is dangerous for animals. If they stay longer doing their thing, they’re exposing themselves and risking being discovered,” says Patricia Yang, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Yang, a doctoral student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, worked on the study with David Hu, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics.
All mammals big or small take about 12 seconds to defecate 2017-04-26T00:00:00-04:00Somebody give David Hu's graduate and undergraduate students medals for bravery -- and maybe some hazmat suits. Hu, an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics, is a 2015 Ig Nobel Prize winner for his "urination duration" research, and he and his intrepid fluid dynamics team have also gotten hands-on (yuck) with frog saliva. Now he has studied the physics of poop among mammals, venturing to Zoo Atlanta to follow elephants around and figure out things like speed, duration, size, mucosity, etc. Hu, also an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, makes the connection between his research and a better understanding of gastrointestinal health. The research also helped his team design state-of-the-art undergarments for astronauts. Hu's study was published April 25 in the journal (wait for it)....Soft Matter.
extreme temperatures 2017-04-26T00:00:00-04:00Imagine a liquid that could move on its own without human effort or the pull of gravity. You could put it in a container flat on a table, not touch it in any way, and it would still flow. As reported in Science, researchers have taken the first step in creating a self-propelling liquid. The finding offers the promise of developing an entirely new class of fluids that can flow without human or mechanical effort. School of Physics Associate Professor Alberto Fernandez-Nieves and postdoctoral fellow Ya-Wen Chang co-authored the study, which was led by collaborators at Brandeis University.
reconfigurable transceivers 2017-03-28T00:00:00-04:00- ‹ previous
- 21 of 23
- next ›
Experts in the News
Other planets, dwarf planets and moons in our solar system have seasonal cycles — and they can look wildly different from the ones we experience on Earth, experts told Live Science.
To understand how other planets have seasons, we can look at what drives seasonal changes on our planet. "The Earth has its four seasons because of the spin axis tilt," Gongjie Li, associate professor in the School of Physics, told Live Science. This means that our planet rotates at a slight angle of around 23.5 degrees.
"On Earth, we're very lucky, this spin axis is quite stable," Li said. Due to this, we've had relatively stable seasonal cycles that have persisted for millennia, although the broader climate sometimes shifts as the entire orbit of Earth drifts further or closer from the sun.
Such stability has likely helped life as we know it develop here, Li said. Scientists like her are now studying planetary conditions and seasonal changes on exoplanets to see whether life could exist in faroff worlds. For now, it seems as though the mild seasonal changes and stable spin tilts on Earth are unique.
Live Science 2025-05-05T00:00:00-04:00Biofilms 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 2025-01-02T00:00:00-05:00
