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To explore the mathematical possibilities of alternative geometries, mathematicians imagine such ‘non-Euclidean’ spaces, where parallel lines can intersect or veer apart. Now, with the help of relatively affordable VR devices, researchers are making curved spaces — a counter-intuitive concept with implications for Einstein’s theory underlying gravity and also for seismology — more accessible. They may even uncover new mathematics in the process. “You can think about it, but you don’t get a very visceral sense of this until you actually experience it,” says Elisabetta Matsumoto, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
college of engineering; ISyE; fellowships; grad students; student awards; orise; cdc 2017-03-21T00:00:00-04:00Bright radiation emitted by neighboring galaxies likely fueled the rapid growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe, a new study shows. John Wise, an associate professor in the School of Physics, is a co-author of the study.
GradIO 2017-03-18T00:00:00-04:00It’s no secret that supermassive black holes are heartless beasts: These objects of immense gravity that let nothing, not even light escape, have fascinated astronomers since the early 20th century. While it’s believed that so-called supermassive black holes lurk at the center of most galaxies, including our own, there’s still much we don’t know about how they formed, or why, except to remind us of our own mortality. But new research from an international team of scientists might have some answers to at least one of the critical questions -- namely, how supermassive black holes, which range in size from millions to billions of solar masses, apparently formed very quickly in the early universe. Using computer simulations, the researchers found that these giants can grow incredibly fast if they can suck the life (read: radiation) out of a nearby galaxy, disabling their host galaxy’s ability to create stars...The researchers found that the neighboring galaxy supplying the radiation had to be a certain size and distance away from the black hole’s host galaxy -- though these cosmic energy sources could be smaller and closer galaxies than other studies estimated. “The nearby galaxy can’t be too close, or too far away, and like the Goldilocks principle, too hot or too cold,” study co-author John Wise, an associate astrophysics professor at Georgia Tech, said. Wise is an associate professor in the School of Physics.
faculty spotlight 2017-03-13T00:00:00-04:00
More than ten years ago, astronomers made a discovery that has puzzled them ever since – supermassive black holes appeared to have popped up soon after the start of the Universe. It is thought to take billions of years for supermassive black holes to form, but at least 20 of them were spotted at the dawn of the Universe, just 800 million years after the Big Bang. A team of researchers from Dublin City University, Columbia University, Georgia Tech, and the University of Helsinki, have now used computer simulations to attempt to solve the mystery. The results say a black hole can grow quickly if the galaxy it is in stops forming stars....To stop stars forming, there has to be a bright galaxy nearby, emitting radiation that can split molecular hydrogen into atomic hydrogen. This prevents stars in the galaxy from forming from the molecular hydrogen...."The nearby galaxy can't be too close, or too far away, and like the Goldilocks principle, too hot or too cold," said co-author John Wise, from Georgia Tech. The researchers published their findings in Nature Astronomy. John Wise is an associate professor in the School of Physics.
in solidarity 2017-03-13T00:00:00-04:00New research clarifies how toroidal droplets—which initially take the shape of a donut—evolve into spherical droplets by collapsing into themselves or breaking up into smaller droplets. Work with droplets has implications for the life sciences, and could improve industrial processes....“Surface tension drives the evolution of the droplets,” says Alexandros Fragkopoulos, a PhD candidate at Georgia Institute of Technology. “Fluids tend to minimize their surface area for a given volume because that minimizes the energy required to have an interface between different fluids. Spherical shapes minimize that energy, and as a result, toroidal droplets want to evolve to become spherical. We’re studying how that transition occurs."...The impetus for the experimental work was inconsistencies between theoretical predictions and computer simulation of toroidal droplet transitions. What the researchers found tends to back up the simulation results. “However, the earlier theoretical work was essential in guiding the theory efforts and in illustrating what the problem was in order to correctly describe the experimental results,” says Alberto Fernandez-Nieves, in whose lab the research took place. Alexandros Fragkopoulos is a graduate teaching assistant in the School of Physics, where Alberto Fernandez-Nieves is an associate professor.
reconfigurable transceivers 2017-03-13T00:00:00-04:00Supermassive black holes sit at the center of nearly every massive galaxy situated in the universe. Scientists don’t know how supermassive black holes form, but a new paper in the journal Nature Astronomy, illustrates a theory crazy enough to perhaps work. The running hypothesis is that black holes are born out of the collapse of a star, which can eventually suck up enough mass that they grow into supermassive black holes (SBHs). That process is thought to take billions of years, but scientists have already catalogued some SBHs that date back to 13.8 billion years in age — also the age of the universe. This would mean that some SBHs, if not all, form much more quickly than scientists originally suspected...If a huge nearby galaxy could pump enough radiation into a smaller galaxy that already hosted a black hole, the radiation could split molecular hydrogen into atomic hydrogen, stopping the galaxy from forming new stars and ultimately forcing it to collapse under the gravitational pressure of the black hole. Thus, the black hole would suck up that mass and quickly become an SBH...“The nearby galaxy can’t be too close, or too far away, and like the Goldilocks principle, too hot or too cold,” said John Wise, co-author of the study and associate astrophysics professor at Georgia Tech. Wise is an associate professor in the School of Physics.
Murder Mystery 2017-03-13T00:00:00-04:00You never know when a frog playing an electronic game will lead to an experiment on the physics of saliva....Alexis C. Noel, a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech, and her supervisor, David L. Hu, were watching a viral YouTube video in which a frog is attacking the screen of a smartphone running an ant-smashing game. It appears to be winning. They started wondering how — in reality — frog tongues stick to insects so quickly when they shoot out to grab them, and decided it was a phenomenon worth studying. David Hu is an associate professor of mechanical engineering and of biology, as well as an adjunct associate professor of physics, at Georgia Tech.
Extension of Self 2017-02-06T00:00:00-05:00Georgia Tech researchers explain how frogs maintain their grip on their prey during the speedy attacks with their prehensile tongues. The study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, was conducted by mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Alexis Noel under the guidance of David Hu, a professor of mechanical engineering and of biology and an adjunct professor of physics.
cohort 2017-02-01T00:00:00-05:00It's not every day that a diving vacation paves the way for a possible technological innovation, much less one that involves earwax. Yet, that's precisely what happened for Alexis Noel. The mechanical engineering PhD candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology described her scuba diving trip, her boyfriend’s subsequent water-clogged ear, and the culprit—earwax—that kept the water trapped behind his eardrum to her professor, David Hu. In no time, the two were engaged in detailed discussions about the sticky substance. Then it hit: What more can be learned from earwax? David Hu is an associate professor of mechanical engineering and of biological sciences and an adjunct associate professor of physics at Georgia Tech.
Pranav Kulkarni 2017-01-25T00:00:00-05:00Students and alumni are noted for their strides in science, technology and entrepreneurship. Among them is School of Physics Ph.D. candidate Karan Jani.
Georgia Tech Lands Seven Yellow Jackets on 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30 2017-01-13T00:00:00-05:00Atlanta Magazine talks to School of Physics Professor and Director of the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics Deirdre Shoemaker and School of Physics Associate Professor Laura Cadonati, who were part of the international team that confirmed in February 2016 the existence of gravitational waves. These elusive cosmic phenomena were first predicted a century ago by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Laura Czyzewski 2016-09-01T00:00:00-04:00- ‹ previous
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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
