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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working with a team from China’s Tianjin University, claim to have developed the first functional semiconductor from graphene, a single-layer carbon structure renowned for its robust bonds. Led by Walter De Heer, Regents' Professor in the School of Physics, the study published in Nature details a graphene semiconductor compatible with standard microelectronic processing methods, a fundamental requirement for any viable alternative to silicon.
Electronic Engineer Times Europe 2024-02-28T00:00:00-05:00When Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made the observation that came to be known as Moore's Law, he projected that transistor density would continue doubling in density every two years... for another ten years. Working with Tianjin University in China, though, researchers at Georgia Tech have made a breakthrough in this department by growing graphene on doped silicon carbide wafers, introducing impurities into the graphene that give it a usable band gap, enabling the researchers to create graphene transistors the size of a carbon atom. In research led by School of Physics Regents' Professor Walter De Heer, these switches can reach into the teraHertz range and run cooler than silicon transistors, potentially breathing new life into the aging Moore's Law.
RedShark News 2024-02-27T00:00:00-05:00A recent publication from the group of Prof. Dan Goldman made it to the Cover of Physical Review Letters vol. 132, issue 8 (https://journals.aps.org/prl/covers/132/8). The research article “Probing Hydrodynamic Fluctuation-Induced Forces with an Oscillating Robot”, by Steven W. Tarr, Joseph S. Brunner, Daniel Soto, and Daniel I. Goldman, Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 084001 was published on 20 February 2024, and was also selected as an Editor’s Suggestion (https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.084001).
Physical Review Letters 2024-02-23T00:00:00-05:00Ph.D. Robotics Student in Robotics Tianyu Wang and Postdoctoral Physics Scholar Christopher Pierce are developing snakelike, limbless robots. The robots could come in handy in search-and-rescue situations, where they could navigate collapsed buildings to find and assist survivors — and could readily move through confined and cluttered spaces such as debris fields, where walking or wheeled robots and human rescuers tend to fail.
The Conversation 2024-02-14T00:00:00-05:00Scientists have been trying to build snakelike, limbless robots for decades. These robots could come in handy in search-and-rescue situations, where they could navigate collapsed buildings to find and assist survivors. Georgia Tech researchers Tianyu Wang, a robotics Ph.D. student, and Christopher Pierce, a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Physics, recently shared how they go about building these robots, drawing inspiration from creatures like worms and snakes. Wang and Pierce work with Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics. This story has been republished in Know Techie, IOT World Today and The Good Men Project.
The Conversation 2024-02-14T00:00:00-05:00A new theory allows researchers to create easy-to-solve mathematical models using cables, a previously challenging mathematical problem — offering key insights into the behavior of deformable solids, with applications spanning from engineering and biology to nanotechnology. The work, also shared on Phys.org, was led by School of Physics Assistant Professor Zeb Rocklin and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Mirage News 2024-02-12T00:00:00-05:00Brandon Pries is a graduate student in the School of Physics who researches computational astrophysics with Professor John Wise, using machine learning to study the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes in the early universe. Pries has also done extensive research with the NSF IceCube Collaboration. Pries recently shared a deep dive on neutrinos with astrobites, a daily literature journal (an "astro-ph reader's digest") supported by the AAS.
astrobites 2024-02-08T00:00:00-05:00Atlanta Science Festival (ASF) presented by Delta Air Lines, the city’s ultimate celebration of all things science and one of the largest of its kind in the country, returns March 9-23. All ages can experience more than 100 interactive and educational events. The Exploration Expo, a giant science bash in Piedmont Park, returns as the grand finale of the Festival. The Festival will kickstart with the Science and Engineering Day at Georgia Tech. An array of hands-on STEAM activities, exhibits, and demonstrations will feature robotics, brains, biology, space, art, nanotechnology, paper, computer science, wearable tech, bioengineering, chemical engineering, systems engineering, and more.
Atlanta Daily World 2024-01-29T00:00:00-05:00This story about three alumni from Ohio Northern University's School of Science, Technology, and Mathematics who are making a mark in the world of physics and mathematics include Matthew Golden, who is now a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Physics. Golden's research in the Extreme Astrophysics lab focuses on the interface of machine learning and physics.
Ohio Northern University 2024-01-22T00:00:00-05:00Silicon has long reigned as the material of choice for the microchips that power everything in the digital age, from AI to military drones. Silicon chips have been bumping against the limits of miniaturization for years, dividing chip makers on whether Moore’s law, the longstanding assumption that transistors will steadily get smaller and computers more powerful, is already dead. But the global semiconductor industry is still under just as much pressure to produce ever more powerful chips, and keep up the pace of technological progress. This month, researchers at Georgia Tech, led by Walter de Heer, Regents' Professor in the School of Physics, created the world’s first functional graphene-based semiconductor, marking what de Heer dubbed a “Wright brothers moment” for the next-generation materials that could make up the electronic devices of the future. (This research was also covered at Physics World, Tech Briefs, TechSpot, Freethink, McGill Daily, and Fudzilla.)
Politico 2024-01-16T00:00:00-05:00In the 21st century, there is a need to develop electronic devices that are both smaller and faster, whether for applications in the medical sector or robotics. Experts have been busy working on producing advanced materials for modern electronic devices to meet this demand. A significant milestone in this endeavor has been achieved by a team of researchers at Georgia Tech, who have successfully engineered the world's first functional semiconductor using graphene. "To me, this is like a Wright brothers moment," said Walter de Heer, Regents' Professor in the School of Physics, who led this development. Silicon, commonly used in semiconductors, is nearing its limits in the face of increased demand for quicker processing and smaller electronic devices. Graphene is a two-dimensional honeycomb-like structure formed by a single layer of carbon atoms organized in a hexagonal lattice. It is well-known for having strong electrical conductivity, mechanical strength, and flexibility. "It's an extremely robust material, one that can handle very large currents and can do so without heating up and falling apart," said de Heer. (This story was also covered at Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, Fox5 Atlanta, LiveScience, ScienceDaily, Semiconductor Engineering, Chemistry World, Global Times, ScienceX, The Print, New Scientist, Technology Networks, Tom's Hardware, South China Morning Post, AZO Nano, SystemTek, Gearrice, Connexionblog, Innovation News Network, EENews, Medriva, MintLounge, Engineering and Technology, Inceptive Mind, BNN Breaking, Cosmos Magazine, TechXplore, JagranJosh, ABPLive, ChinaDaily, WinBuzzer, and Sportskeeda. )
Interesting Engineering 2024-01-12T00:00:00-05:00Spring, summer, fall and winter – the seasons on Earth change every few months, around the same time every year. It’s easy to take this cycle for granted here on Earth, but not every planet has a regular change in seasons. So why does Earth have regular seasons when other planets don’t? Gongjie Li, assistant professor in the School of Physics, explains about axial tilts of planets, which have big implications for everything from seasons to glacier cycles, since that tilt can determine just how much sun a planet will get. The magnitude of that tilt can even determine whether a planet is habitable to life. (This article by Li was also reprinted in in IFL Science, Qrius, and the Longmont (Colorado) Leader.)
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Experts in the News
An observatory still under construction at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea has spotted what could be the most energetic neutrino ever detected. Such ultra-high-energy neutrinos — tiny subatomic particles that travel at nearly the speed of light — have been known to exist for only a decade or so, and are thought to be messengers from some of the Universe’s most cataclysmic events, such as growth spurts of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies. “It would be really interesting to see where in the sky the neutrino originated,” says Nepomuk Otte, an associate professor in the School of Physics. Otte is leading a proposed project — with a prototype now being tested in Utah — that would search for Earth-skimming neutrinos by monitoring the atmosphere just above the horizon for flashes of light.
Nature 2024-06-21T00:00:00-04:00Knitting, the age-old craft of looping and stitching natural fibers into fabrics, is gaining renewed attention for its potential in advanced manufacturing. Beyond creating garments, knitted textiles hold promise for designing wearable electronics and soft robotics – structures that need to move and bend flexibly. A team of physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology has taken the technical know-how of knitting and added a mathematical foundation to it. Led by Elisabetta Matsumoto, associate professor in the School of Physics, and Krishma Singal, a graduate researcher in Matsumoto’s lab, the team used experiments and simulations to quantify and predict how knitted fabric responses can be programmed.
Earth.com 2024-06-20T00:00:00-04:00Robotics engineers have worked for decades, using substantial funding, to create robots that can walk or run with the ease of animals. Despite these efforts, today’s robots still cannot match the natural abilities of many animals in terms of endurance, agility, and robustness. Seeking to understand and quantify this disparity, an interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers from top research institutions, including Dunn Family Associate Professor at the School of Physics and the School of Biological Sciences Simon Sponberg, conducted a comprehensive study to compare various aspects of robotic systems designed for running with their biological counterparts. (This also appeared at The Jerusalem Post, TechXplore, and SciTechDaily.)
Earth.com 2024-04-26T00:00:00-04:00A group of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created the world’s first functional semiconductor made from graphene, a development that could lead to advanced electronic devices and quantum computing applications. Seen as the building block of electronic devices, semiconductors are essential for communications, computing, healthcare, military systems, transportation and countless other applications. Semiconductors are typically made from silicon, but this material is reaching its limit in the face of increasingly faster computing and smaller electronic devices, according to the Georgia Tech research team who published their findings in Nature earlier this year. In a drive to find a viable alternative to silicon, Walter de Heer, Regents' Professor in the School of Physics, led a team of researchers based in Atlanta, Georgia and Tianjin, China to produce a graphene semiconductor that is compatible with microelectronics processing methods.
Gas World 2024-04-26T00:00:00-04:00In an opinion published in the May 2024 edition of APSNews, School of Physics Professor Andrew Zangwill reflects on the debate on the boundaries of physics and its impact on the discipline. Zangwill states “for more than a century, physicists have been drawing and redrawing the borders around the field, embracing and rejecting subfields along the way.”
American Physical Society News 2024-04-12T00:00:00-04:00The stars aligned to give a Georgia Tech undergraduate student and an alum the moment of a lifetime during the recent solar eclipse. Corinne Hill is currently majoring in physics with a concentration in astrophysics. Nathaniel Greve graduated in 2023 with a degree in computer science. The couple met in 2021 when they both played alto saxes in the Georgia Tech marching band. After being unable to experience totality in 2017, Greve said the pair made plans to go to Wapakoneta, Ohio, for 2024′s eclipse. Hill’s friends in the Astronomy Club went to the Ozarks to experience the eclipse, but Hill agreed to go to Ohio instead.
Atlanta News First 2024-04-11T00:00:00-04:00
