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.
New evidence has surfaced suggesting that exoplanet Kepler-186f could have changing seasons and a climate, much like Earth. The discovery is exciting astronomers and leading to calls for newer, more detailed studies of this alien world. If Kepler-186f sounds familiar, that's because it's been in the news before: the Earthlike world has been a subject of scientific inquiry since it was first discovered in April 2014, with the help of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which revealed it to be an Earth-size planet whose orbit is located within a habitable distance from its sun. A new study published in the Astronomical Journal corroborates the previous findings and suggests there is even more reason to believe it could be an Earth 2.0. Using simulations, authors Yutong Shan and Gongjie Li analyzed the planet's spin-axis dynamics, meaning the relationship between the planet's axis of orbit relative to its orbit around its host star… “Our study is among the first to investigate climate stability of exoplanets and adds to the growing understanding of these potentially habitable nearby worlds,” said Li, an author of the study and assistant professor in the School of Physics.
Of all the exoplanets, planets outside of Earth's solar system, discovered in recent years, one that's captured some of the most attention is Kepler-186f. It's often described as one of the "most Earth-like" of all exoplanets discovered and a new study just adds to the case. A new look at Kepler-186f's axial tilt, also known as obliquity, is stable just like Earth's … Researchers at Georgia Tech looked at the relationship between Earth and Mars to better understand Kepler-186f … “It appears that both exoplanets are very different from Mars and the Earth because they have a weaker connection with their sibling planets. We don’t know whether they possess moons, but our calculations show that even without satellites, the spin axes of Kepler-186f and 62f would have remained constant over tens of millions of years.” says Gongjie Li, a professor who led the study, in a press statement. Li is an assistant professor in the School of Physics. Several other outlets have picked up the story: Popular Science, CNET, MSN, Newsweek, New Atlas, and SciTech Daily.
A Georgia Tech team is one of eight finalists in the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge. The Biomimicry Institute selected the finalists from more than 60 teams from 16 countries. Georgia Tech's Team Full Circle students from the College of Sciences: Savannah Barry, Kenji Bomer, and Sara Thomas Mathews, respectively from the Schools of Biological Sciences, Physics, and Mathematics. School of Biological Sciences Professor Jeannette Yen served as faculty mentor. The team moves on to the 2018-19 Biomimicry Launchpad to compete for the $100,000 Ray C. Anderson Ray of Hope Prize. Other members of Team Full Circle are from the College of Engineering. View the team's proposal for sustainable energy here.
Mike Wolf 2018-06-26T00:00:00-04:00Scientists have spotted a theorized—but never-before detected—property of quantum matter in the lab. The team proved that a particular quantum material can demonstrate electrical dipole fluctuations—irregular oscillations of tiny charged poles on the material—even in extremely cold conditions, in the neighborhood of minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit. The story is based on a Science paper, coauthored by School of Physics Assistant Professor Martin Mourigal.
reconfigurable transceivers 2018-06-12T00:00:00-04:00Maggots aren't the cutest creatures. But David Hu, who is affiliated with the School of Physics and the School of Biological Sciences, spends time with them in a lab, studying their motion to determine how they are able to eat food so efficiently. Hu's lab is not a creepy, crawling maggot madhouse without a purpose: these creatures may be harnessed for breaking down waste.
John Lewis Student Center 2018-04-13T00:00:00-04:00"A study spearheaded by scientists at Georgia Tech has found that an obscure class of crystal could improve the way we light and power our world. The subatomic behavior of these crystals is fluid, dynamic and, frankly, bewildering in the context of some established laws of quantum physics. However, this latest study, completed early this month, shows that weirdness doesn’t necessarily mean ineffectiveness. In fact, the substance could be the key to more efficient electric lighting—perhaps even across a full rainbow of colors." The study is by School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Physics Professor Carlos Silva and Ph.D. student Felix Thouin.
Daniel Muratore 2018-03-26T00:00:00-04:00"A person's accomplishments accumulate over years and decades. Something else accumulates, too — their poop. The quantities of poop that people leave behind during an individual bathroom break can vary widely, depending on age, body weight, diet, exercise and other factors." David Hu's research on how long it takes animals to defecate informs this story. Hu is affiliated with the Schools of Mechanical Engineering, Biological Sciences, and Physics.
nicholas platt 2018-03-21T00:00:00-04:00Legendary physicist/cosmologist Stephen Hawking died on March 14, and the news is already prompting stories about the inspiration he provided to scientists around the world. For Karan Jani, a postdoctoral research fellow with Georgia Tech's Center for Relativistic Astrophysics, it was Hawking's classic book A Brief History of Time that launched him on his own path to success in physics. Jani was part of the Georgia Tech LIGO Scientific Collaboration team that detected the first gravitational waves, an achievement that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the LIGO founders. This link within the Quartz India story leads you to Jani's heartfelt recollection of the lunch he once shared with Hawking.
seung-eun chang 2018-03-15T00:00:00-04:00The latest discovery from Georgia Tech physicists may seem like something straight out of Black Mirror. But don't worry, it's not that sinister. School of Physics' Dan Goldman worked with School of Computer Science's Dana Randall and doctoral student William Savoie to develop an algorithm that orders simple robots to "swarm," or move in complex ways as a group. Imagine the birth of the supervillain Sandman in Spider-Man 3, from loose grains of sand skittering across the desert and then congealing into the shape of a human. The possiblities for these "smarticles" are endless. This story has been reproduced in Scientific American.
Metz Mayor 2018-02-14T00:00:00-05:00You won’t feel it happen, but the kilogram, used to measure the mass of electrons, galaxies, and everything in between, is about to be transformed. The General Conference on Weights and Measures is set to meet to redefine the kilogram in terms of a physical constant, Planck's constant. Ronald Fox of the School of Physics, an early advocate of redefining the kilogram, is very pleased. Commenting on the story, he mentions the LIGO experiment to detect gravitational waves, in which Georgia Tech researchers participated. "The unit of mass is very important because you're looking at a very, very delicate effect."
recycling event 2018-02-06T00:00:00-05:00Look up at the winter sky on a clear night. The brilliance of the stars is breathtaking. James Sowell, an astronomer in the School of Physics, weighs in on why stargazing is so beautiful in the winter. "There are more brighter stars in the quarter of the sky that we call the winter sky. Plus, cold air holds less moisture than the warmer summer air, making the nights clearer. So, faint stars that may go unseen during the summer nights may be more visible," Sowell says. So take Sowell's advice, grab your tent, and get out there! Or just come to Public Nights at the Georgia Tech Observatory. The next one is on Feb 22.
materials for energy harvesting 2018-01-23T00:00:00-05:00School of Physics researchers Paul Goldbart, Benjamin Loewe, and Anton Souslov have made a breakthrough in fluid dynamics. They've derived hydrodynamic equations describing active fluids, something that had proven very difficult to do in the past. Their research was published in the New Journal of Physics. Loewe was a doctoral student and Souslov was a postdoctoral research associate in Goldbart's research group in the School of Physics. Goldbart is also College of Sciences Dean and Sutherland Chair .
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Experts in the News
Other planets, dwarf planets and moons in our solar system have seasonal cycles — and they can look wildly different from the ones we experience on Earth, experts told Live Science.
To understand how other planets have seasons, we can look at what drives seasonal changes on our planet. "The Earth has its four seasons because of the spin axis tilt," Gongjie Li, associate professor in the School of Physics, told Live Science. This means that our planet rotates at a slight angle of around 23.5 degrees.
"On Earth, we're very lucky, this spin axis is quite stable," Li said. Due to this, we've had relatively stable seasonal cycles that have persisted for millennia, although the broader climate sometimes shifts as the entire orbit of Earth drifts further or closer from the sun.
Such stability has likely helped life as we know it develop here, Li said. Scientists like her are now studying planetary conditions and seasonal changes on exoplanets to see whether life could exist in faroff worlds. For now, it seems as though the mild seasonal changes and stable spin tilts on Earth are unique.
Live Science 2025-05-05T00:00:00-04:00Biofilms 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 2025-01-02T00:00:00-05:00
