Experts in the News

Georgia Tech researchers have recreated the effects of solar wind on lunar minerals in a laboratory experiment, providing new evidence that the constant stream of charged particles from the sun plays a major role in shaping the moon’s surface.

The team exposed ilmenite, a mineral commonly found on both Earth and the moon, to a synthetic version of solar wind. The experiment produced nanophase iron, tiny metallic particles that are widely observed in lunar soil and are considered a key signature of space weathering.

Researchers have long known that when two galaxies approach each other and merge, the supermassive black holes at their centers form a pair and are eventually expected to merge as well.  It is precisely these mergers that are considered one of the sources of the gravitational-wave background — a faint “hum” of spacetime detected in recent years. However, the role played by the geometry of the collision in this process has remained an open question. 

Graduate student Sena Ghobadi of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Physics, along with her colleagues, has developed three-dimensional dynamic models of such collisions. 

A similar story appeared in Sky & Telescope. 

Assistant Professor Zhu-Xi Luo and Ph.D. student Yi-Lin Tsao from Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Physics have demonstrated a novel mechanism for stabilising physical phases vulnerable to topological defects. Their work addresses a fundamental problem in condensed matter physics: the destabilisation of phases like superfluids by thermally-induced defects such as anyons and vortices. 

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and India's National Center for Biological Sciences have found that yeast clusters, when grown beyond a certain size, spontaneously generate fluid flows powerful enough to ferry nutrients deep into their interior.

In the study, "Metabolically driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast," published in Science Advances, the research team — which included Georgia Tech Ph.D. scholar Emma Bingham, Research Scientist G. Ozan Bozdag, Associate Professor William C. Ratcliff, and Associate Professor Peter Yunker — used experimental evolution to determine whether non-genetic physical processes can enable nutrient transport in multicellular yeast lacking evolved transport adaptations.

A similar story also appeared at The Hindu.

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.