Latest News
The Student and Alumni Leadership Dinner provided a platform for students and alumni to network and share career insights. The event also honored BrandSafway with the inaugural Internship Employer of the Year award, highlighting the company's commitment to offering valuable learning experiences to interns.
Ignacio Taboada has been awarded an NSF grant to build a sensor trigger system for the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment — a powerful neutrino detector that will be built more than 2,600 meters under the surface of the Pacific Ocean, providing a new window into neutrino astrophysics.
From navigating unexpected job pathways to the importance of networking and soft skills, College of Sciences alumni shared insights and advice about leveraging a Georgia Tech education into a successful career at the What Can I Do With My Georgia Tech Science Degree (Life Sciences) event.
Dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair Susan Lozier has been reappointed to a five-year term in the College of Sciences.
Events
School of Physics Thesis Dissertation Defense
Corey Brummel-Smith From Particles to Prints: Simulating Cosmic Dawn and the Children of the First Stars
Fossil Friday
Come join the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab every Friday for Fossil Fridays! Become a fossil hunter and help discover how vertebrate communities have changed through time.
School Of Physics Fall Colloquium Series-Dr. Ana Maria Rey
Ana Maria Rey (JILA, NIST, Univ. of Colorado) Advances in Quantum Simulation and Sensing Using Two Dimensional Ion Crystals
Fossil Friday
Come join the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab every Friday 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.
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.
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.
Experts in the News
Despite 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 2024-08-26T00:00:00-04:00Scientists 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.
The neutrinos were detected over a span of a decade at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at a U.S. scientific research station at the South Pole, using more than 5,000 sensors covering an area the size of a small mountain.
School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada is the spokesperson for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and provides a brief commentary on this new research:
"This observation is ground-breaking. It established the galaxy as a neutrino source. Every future work will refer to this observation," says Taboada.
Reuters 2024-07-29T00:00:00-04:00Groundbreaking research is shedding new light on how biofilms grow — using physics and mathematical models. Biofilms grow everywhere — from plaque on teeth, to medical devices, to the open ocean. But until now, it’s been difficult to study just what controls their growth. In a new study published in Nature Physics, researchers from the Yunker Lab in the School of Physics, including Lead Researcher Aawaz Pokhrel and Associate Professor Peter Yunker, leveraged physics to show that a biofilm’s geometry is the single most important factor in determining growth rate — more important than even the rate at which cells can reproduce. Since some research shows that 80% of infections in human bodies are caused by the bacteria in biofilms, understanding how colonies grow has important human health implications, potentially to help reduce their impact in medical settings or industrial processes. (This also appeared in Phys.org and Dental Review News.)
Nature Physics 2024-07-09T00:00:00-04:00Every few seconds, somewhere in the observable Universe, a massive star collapses and unleashes a supernova explosion. Physicists say Japan’s Super-Kamiokande (Super-K) observatory might now be collecting a steady trickle of neutrinos from those cataclysms — amounting to a few detections a year.
In an article published in Nature, School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada provides a brief commentary on this new research: "The data from Super-K are still too weak to claim a discovery, but the prospect of detecting the diffuse neutrinos is extremely exciting”, says Tabaoda, who is also the spokesperson for the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole. “Neutrinos would provide an independent measurement on the history of star formation in the Universe.”
Nature 2024-07-09T00:00:00-04:00Recent demonstrations of moiré magnetism, featuring exotic phases with noncollinear spin order in the twisted van der Waals (vdW) magnet chromium triiodide CrI3, have highlighted the potential of twist engineering of magnetic (vdW) materials. In this paper, researchers, including School of Physics assistant professors Hailong Wang and Chunhui Du, reported the observation of two distinct magnetic phase transitions with separate critical temperatures within a moiré supercell of small-angle twisted double trilayer CrI3.
Nature Communications 2024-07-08T00:00:00-04:00
