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.
Small robots that have two flapping arms and can’t move around on their own can spontaneously link up and glide together instead. This self-organization may be related to how complex structures arise from simple building blocks in nature. Daniel Goldman, professor in the School of Physics, and his colleagues used small robots called smarticles — short for “smart active particles” — to observe self-organization in the lab.
Alan Gilbert (MS Phys 93) was recently named co-chairman of The Foundry Inc., a private non-profit learning-based high school in Fayetteville, Ga. The news is highlighted in the Class Notes listings of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine's Ramblin' Roll section.
Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine's Class Notes 2022-04-14T00:00:00-04:00Those who are allergic to yeast but still crave a pizza every now and then may get a rise out of this report: A materials scientist at the University of Naples Federico II has led a team of researchers to develop a yeast-free pizza dough. The results of the study were published in the Physics of Fluids journal. David Hu, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and an adjunct professor in the School of Physics, was not involved in the study, but weighs in on the function of yeast in pizza dough, .
Roll over sourdough. Italian scientists develop a new way to rise pizza crust 2022-03-22T00:00:00-04:00Black soldier fly larvae devour food waste and other organic matter and are made of 60% protein. But they’re increasingly dying before they reach livestock facilities as animal feed. Researchers, recognizing the culprit is the collective heat generated when the maggots eat in crowded conditions, have found that delivering the right amount of airflow could help solve the overheating issue. A study with those findings, published in Frontiers in Physics, is co-authored by David Hu, professor in the Georgia W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering with a joint appointment in the School of Biological Sciences; and Daniel Goldman, professor in the School of Physics.
How To Raise Larvae on Food Scraps to Feed Livestock 2022-01-05T00:00:00-05:00The Georgia Tech women's volleyball team has a shot to play in their first-ever NCAA Final Four, and third-year School of Physics major Julia Bergmann is a big reason why. The 6' 5'' outside hitter, the ACC's player of the year, made some key kills and serves in the team's Thursday night win over Ohio State. That gives Georgia Tech its second-ever appearance in the Elite 8. Bergmann, whose hometown is Munich, Germany, went to high school in Brusque, Brazil. (Here's the AJC's story on Bergmann being named ACC player of the year, becoming the first Georgia Tech player to win that honor since 2004.)
Julia Bergmann leads Georgia Tech into volleyball Sweet 16 2021-12-10T00:00:00-05:00Ants are among the most industrious creatures on Earth, so it's only fitting that engineers would look to them for inspiration when designing small robots that can collaborate on complex tasks and maneuver through uneven territory. Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics, was part of a team that created a simple but effective swarm of six-inch "robot" ants that were able to overcome obstacles and terrain individually, and link up to form longer chains when they couldn't accomplish a task alone.
Engineers design 3D-printed robot 'ants' that can walk over leaves, link up like a centipede and call for help by themselves 2021-11-08T00:00:00-05:00The 17th annual University System of Georgia (USG) Regents’ Scholarship Gala, sponsored by the USG Foundation, included the announcement of the six 2021 recipients of the Felton Jenkins Jr. Hall of Fame Faculty Award. This prestigious teaching award recognizes faculty’s important contributions to their schools and fields of study, and for their strong commitment to teaching and student success. Michael F. Schatz, interim chair and professor, School of Physics, is one of the award recipients.
omsc webinar 2021-10-15T00:00:00-04:00Andras Karsai, a graduate student researcher and Ph.D. candidate in the School of Physics, will present research he has conducted with Dunn Family Professor Daniel Goldman at the 74th annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics in Phoenix November 21-23. Karsai, a member of Goldman's Complex Rheology and Biomechanics (CRAB) Lab, will present the findings of a research study titled Pinned Bubble Dynamics in Locally Fluized Granular Media on Sunday, Nov. 21st.
master of science in cybersecurity 2021-10-12T00:00:00-04:00Researchers have discovered that environments favoring clumpy growth are all that’s needed to quickly transform single-celled yeast into complex multicellular organisms. Georgia Tech scientists report that over the course of nearly two years of evolution, they have induced unicellular yeasts to grow into multicellular clusters of immense size, going from microscopic to branching structures visible to the naked eye. Those scientists include William Ratcliff, associate professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences, G. Ozan Bozdag, research scientist, and Kai Tong, Ph.D. student, all School of Biological Sciences; and Peter Yunker, assistant professor, Thomas C. Day, graduate student, and Seyed Alireza Zamani-Dahaj, former graduate student, all in the School of Physics.
Metz Mayor 2021-09-22T00:00:00-04:00
According to a new Georgia Tech study, honeybees have developed a way to convert pollen particles into viscoelastic pellets, allowing them to be efficiently, quickly, and reliably transported to the hive. The study also suggests that insects remove pollen from their bodies at a rate 2-10 times slower than normal grooming rates. College of Sciences researchers who worked on the study include David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences; Peter Yunker, assistant professor, and Gabi Steinbach, postdoctoral researcher, both in the School of Physics. (The study was also reported at Phys.org.)
Nicholas J. Conrad Laboratory 2021-08-25T00:00:00-04:00Scientists are learning a lot about swarm intelligence by studying worms, which have been observed grouping together in balls and acting like a liquid. Researchers at Georgia Tech published an article after studying the behaviors of the California blackworm — and designed a robotic model to mirror the worms’ behavior. The researchers include Dan Goldman, Dunn Family Professor, School of Physics; Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, former Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow, now assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame; and M. Saad Bhamla, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
student poster competition 2021-08-19T00:00:00-04:00Astronomers have definitively detected a black hole devouring a neutron star for the first – and second – time. These cataclysmic events created ripples in space-time called gravitational waves that travelled more than 900 million light years to reach detectors on Earth. Many astronomers contributed to the findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, including Bhavesh Khamesra, a graduate student in the School of Physics. The study was also covered at Phys.org.
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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
