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.
Laura Cadonati, Associate Dean for Research in the College of Sciences and a professor in the School of Physics, will serve as a General Councilor for the American Physical Society, following recent APS elections. Her term will begin January 1, 2024. Cadonati, who is also a member of Georgia Tech's Center for Relativistic Astrophysics, will join other elected members to advise the Society on all matters regarding science and membership, including science policy. "Throughout my research journey in nuclear physics, astrophysics, and gravity, along with my active participation in large scientific collaborations, I have developed an understanding of the interconnectedness and the different traditions in various branches of physics," Cadonati says. "These insights will enable me to represent the wide constituency of APS."
American Physical Society 2023-09-28T00:00:00-04:00Around the coasts of the continents, where slopes sink down into the sea, tiny cages of ice called clathrates trap methane gas, preventing it from escaping and bubbling up into the atmosphere. Until now, the biological process behind how methane gas remains stable under the sea has been almost completely unknown. In a breakthrough study, a cross-disciplinary team of Georgia Tech researchers discovered a previously unknown class of bacterial proteins that play a crucial role in the formation and stability of methane clathrates. College of Sciences team members include Jennifer Glass, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; Raquel Lieberman, professor and Sepcic-Pfeil Chair in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry; Dustin Huard, a researcher in Lieberman’s lab and first author of the study; Abigail Johnson, a former Ph.D. student in Glass’ lab and co-first author on the paper, and James (JC) Gumbart, professor in the School of Physics. (The study was also covered at India Education Diary, SciTechDaily, Space.com, and Astrobiology.)
ScienceDaily 2023-09-27T00:00:00-04:00Researchers are exploring how active matter can be harnessed for tasks like designing new materials with tailored properties, understanding the behavior of biological organisms, and even developing new approaches to robotics and autonomous systems. But that’s only possible if scientists learn how the microscopic units making up active matter interact, and whether they can affect these interactions and thereby the collective properties of active matter on the macroscopic scale. School of Physics Professor Roman Grigoriev and his research colleagues have found a potential first step by developing a new model of active matter that generated new insight into the physics of the problem. They detail their methods and results in a new study published in Science Advances, “Physically informed data-driven modeling of active nematics.” Lead author of the study is graduate researcher Matthew Golden. Co-authors are graduate researcher Jyothishraj Nambisan and Alberto Fernandez-Nieves, professor in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Barcelona and a former associate professor of Physics at Georgia Tech. (This research was also covered in WorldTimeTodays andCityLife.)
Phys.org 2023-09-04T00:00:00-04:00There’s no artist more vibrant, spiritual, or creative than Mother Earth. Then, we have mortals like Georgia Tech School of Physics alumni Dylan Diamond, who execute Mother Earth’s designs into functional tools or, in this case, a timepiece: “Moss Clock.” The clock has its own gear train and servo, or motors. The bottom line: this technology is a clock composed of living moss. Diamond had the idea to make a “digitally inspired” clock where moving panels of different colored moss resemble a classic digital clock display. "My physics degree helped, but I firmly believe that in the age of information, with public access to so many free tutorials and teachers online, anyone can do something like this," Diamond said.
Atlanta Jewish Times 2023-08-30T00:00:00-04:00The science world is remembering W. Jason Morgan, who in 1967 developed the theory of plate tectonics — a framework that revolutionized the study of earthquakes, volcanoes and the slow, steady shift of the continents across the earth’s mantle. Morgan, who died July 31 at his home in Natick, Mass., attended Georgia Tech and received his B.S. from the School of Physics in 1955.
The New York Times 2023-08-11T00:00:00-04:00Researchers have developed a method to construct solid objects that roll down pre-determined paths, which they reckon could have applications in quantum mechanics and medicine. To get a ball of malleable clay to roll down a simple path, you can force it down a specific path once, squashing it as you go. Take it to the top again, restart it from the initial starting point on the ball's surface, and it will roll down the same path. The researchers took this principle to develop an algorithm that could produce a shape capable of following almost any pre-determined path, even making the weird-shaped solids out of 3D-printed plastic and solid ball-bearings (for weight) to prove the point. Elisabetta Matsumoto, assistant professor in the School of Physics, co-wrote an accompanying article to the study saying "future work developing for more precise mathematical understanding of the issue would help to connect this work to applications, as well as to open up more purely mathematical veins of research."
The Register 2023-08-09T00:00:00-04:00J. Robert Oppenheimer, now the protagonist of a much-anticipated film, is today most known for his scientific leadership of the U.S. Manhattan Project, the World War II–era crash program to build the first-ever atomic bombs. But just a few years earlier, Oppenheimer had found himself pondering very different “weapons” of mass destruction: black holes — although it would be decades before that name arose. “It was influential; it was visionary,” says Feryal Özel, professor and chair of the School of Physics, of Oppenheimer’s work on black holes and neutron stars, the superdense corpses of expired massive stars. “He has a lasting impact.” Özel is a founding member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, which released the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019 — 80 years after Oppenheimer co-authored a paper theorizing that such objects could exist.
Scientific American 2023-07-21T00:00:00-04:00The heart’s electrical system keeps all its muscle cells beating in sync. A hard whack to the chest at the wrong moment, however, can set up unruly waves of abnormal electrical excitation that are potentially deadly. The resulting kind of arrhythmia may be what caused the football player Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills to collapse on the field after he took a powerful hit during a 2023 National Football League game. In this Quanta podcast, Flavio Fenton, a professor in the School of Physics who studies the electrical dynamics of the heart, tells host Steve Strogatz about a new method under development for treating arrhythmias by stimulating the heart with mild, precisely timed shocks — or possibly even with light.
Quanta Magazine 2023-07-12T00:00:00-04:00Human beings for millennia have gazed with awe at the vast torrent of stars — bright and dim — shining in Earth's night sky that comprise the Milky Way. Our home galaxy, however, is now being observed for the first time in a brand new way. Scientists said on Thursday they have produced an image of the Milky Way not based on electromagnetic radiation - light - but on ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. They detected high-energy neutrinos in pristine ice deep below Antarctica's surface, then traced their source back to locations in the Milky Way - the first time these particles have been observed arising from our galaxy. "This observation is ground-breaking. It established the galaxy as a neutrino source. Every future work will refer to this observation," said Ignacio Taboada, professor in the School of Physics and spokesperson for the IceCube research collaboration in Antarctica that produced the image. (The story was also covered in NPR, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Yahoo! News UK, Yahoo! News Canada, The Jerusalem Post, KPBS, Interactions.org, APS (American Physical Society), Vice, El Pais, VOA Learning English, bdnews24, SciTechDaily, PetaPixel, and Sinc.)
Reuters 2023-06-29T00:00:00-04:00Georgia Tech researchers have been selected by NASA to lead a $7.5 million center that will study the lunar environment and the generation and properties of volatiles and dust. The Center for Lunar Environment and Volatile Exploration Research (CLEVER) will be led by Thomas Orlando, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry with an adjunct appointment in the School of Physics. CLEVER is the successor to Orlando’s pioneering REVEALS (Radiation Effects on Volatiles and Exploration of Asteroids and Lunar Surfaces) center, and both are part of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) program.
India Education Diary 2023-06-26T00:00:00-04:00Researchers at Seton Hill University, Pennsylvania State University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology looked to the mudskipper, the amphibious fish that spends more than half of its adult life on land to study the evolution of blinking. The study, published in an April edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that blinking may be one of the overlooked and yet important traits that allowed for the successful transition to life on land. Simon Sponberg, Dunn Family Associate Professor in the School of Physics and the School of Biological Sciences, was one of the researchers for the study. (The study was also covered in the Los Angeles Times High School Insider.)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 2023-06-10T00:00:00-04:00In this story about the puzzling behavior that goes on inside black holes, Quanta Magazine uses the 2017 first-ever image of the black hole at the heart of the M87 galaxy captured by an Event Horizon Telescope research team. That team included EHT founding members Feryal Özel, professor and chair of the School of Physics, and Dimitrios Psaltis, a professor in the School. The story also includes the recent machine learning-enhanced version of the image.
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Events
School of Physics Spring Colloquium Series-Dr. Lia Medeiros
Lia Medeiros(Univ. of Wisconsin Milwaukee) EHT images of black holes: what we've learned from them and how we can improve them
Systems Matter Seminar | Materials-Driven Strategies for Translational Bioelectrical Interfaces
Featuring Bozhi Tian, professor at the University of Chicago department of Chemistry
Entanglement in Tensor Networks- Dr. Andrej Gendiar, School of Physics CM/AMO/Quantum Seminar
Tensor Networks are special classes of variational quantum states typically applied to study strongly correlated many-body systems.
Fossil Friday
Come join the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab for Fossil Fridays! Become a fossil hunter and help discover how vertebrate communities have changed through time.
Observatory Public Night
On the grounds between the Howey and Mason Buildings, several telescopes are typically set up for viewing, and visitors are invited to bring their own telescope, as well.
C-PIES Summer Cookout
Join fellow College of Sciences faculty, staff, students, and alumni for food, games, and fun.
Experts in the News
Postdoctoral 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 2024-09-05T00:00:00-04:00Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Physics including fifth-year PhD student Mengqi Huang and Assistant Professor Chunhui Rita Du are among the authors of a paper recently published in Nature Physics. Researchers from six universities and Oak Ridge National Laboratory showed that strong quantum fluctuations can stabilize an unconventional magnetic phase after destroying a more conventional one.
Nature Physics 2024-08-26T00:00:00-04:00
