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.
By now, you should be aware that of the coast-to-coast total solar eclipse happening next Monday, and Atlanta will experience 97 percent totality. If you aren't aware, then you're obviously Captain America and you've just been thawed out of that ice you were trapped in for the past 70 years. Georgia Tech is certainly aware, and this story by reporter Carl Willis of WSB-TV does a good job of covering what we have planned. Included in the interviews are College of Sciences Dean and Sutherland Chair Paul Goldbart, and Tech astronomer James Sowell, School of Physics senior academic professional and director of the Georgia Tech Observatory.
Paul S. Goggin 2017-08-17T00:00:00-04:00Karan Jani stayed very busy during his time in the School of Physics. In addition to being a doctoral candidate, Jani was also a key member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) team that first observed the existence of gravitational waves in 2015. Jani received his Ph.D. this year. Now the astrophysicist has returned to his native India, but he is still busy as he is helping to reform that country's education system.
Storage Farm 2017-08-10T00:00:00-04:00The word is getting out; Georgia Tech has a full afternoon of activities planned for the solar eclipse on Monday, Aug. 21, which also happens to be the first day of classes for the fall semester. Eclipse glasses, a live eclipse video feed from the Georgia Tech Observatory, the "music" of the solar system, and free Moon Pies await our community. Our agenda is showing up on lists for where to watch the eclipse in metro Atlanta, including this wrapup at myAJC.com, this story at Atlanta NPR affiliate WABE 90.1, and this roundup on the mom-centric website Romper.com.
8 places to view the solar eclipse in metro Atlanta 2017-08-10T00:00:00-04:00As you can imagine, our resident astronomer and director of the Georgia Tech Observatory, James Sowell, is getting very excited about the Aug. 21 solar eclipse. Yet the one issue he wants to emphasize in the days leading up to the big celestial event is eclipse-viewing safety, and he gets a chance to talk about it in this "Eye on Blindness" podcast with host Carol McCullough of the Georgia Radio Reading Service. Sowell also provides details on campus events planned for the Aug. 21 eclipse and how to make your own pinhole camera. In addition to his stargazing duties, Sowell is a senior academic professional and graduate recruiter in the School of Physics.
Valentine's Flowers 2017-08-03T00:00:00-04:00Should Ph.D. students put their research work on hold for internships? It can be a challenge, but this story argues for its consideration. The real-world experience one acquires as an intern can help round out research students' résumés, give them an early taste of the professional world, and provide them with networking opportunities. Margot Paez, a Ph.D. student in the School of Physics, recounts her experiences interning at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during summer and winter breaks.
college of engineering; ISyE; fellowships; grad students; student awards; orise; cdc 2017-08-02T00:00:00-04:00The latest research led by David Hu on fire ants and their tower-building capabilities is compelling enough on its own. But video really adds a "wow" factor to it, and this Vox entry is a great example. In addition to an interview with Hu, it also has lab video showing living blobs of entangled ants being handled by researchers like they were lumps of Play-Doh. Hu is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. He is also an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics.
Ramblin' Royalty 2017-07-25T00:00:00-04:00When fire ants studied by David Hu escaped his Georgia Tech lab and invaded a nearby professor's office, their method of breaking out – building an Eiffel Tower-shaped structure out of their own bodies – became part of Hu's research. That's how this New York Times story begins regarding Hu's new study of ant tower-building abilities. (Here's a New York Times video on Hu's research.) Quartz also covered the study; its story describes how speeding up the research video of the ants provided a better look at how the insects cycled themselves through the tower-building process. Hu is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. He is also an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics.
Blanchard Early Career Professorship 2017-07-17T00:00:00-04:00
It's a story right up Science Friday's alley: the remarkable ability of fire ants to build soaring towers out of their own bodies. The new research from School of Biological Sciences Associate Professor David Hu gives public radio host Ira Flatow a chance to ask Hu not only about ant engineering, but also about what a fellow Tech professor thought when things got a little antsy in his office. Hu is also an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics.
John Lewis Student Center 2017-07-14T00:00:00-04:00
New research focusing on the remarkable tower-building abilities of fire ants continues to attract attention from top media outlets, such as this story from the Washington Post. Also, study co-author Craig Tovey, a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, takes us behind the scenes of the research in this post for The Conversation. David Hu also worked on the study. Hu is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. He is also an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics.
graduation 2023 2017-07-13T00:00:00-04:00Ants as energetic engineers – that's clear from the latest study led by School of Biological Sciences Associate Professor David Hu. The work reveals in great detail how fire ants can build Eiffel Tower-like structures with their own bodies. Applications could lead to structure-building robots. This New York Times video shows off the Tech research team's experiments, including an X-ray video highlighting the ants' remarkable ability to quickly build wide-base towers. Hu is also an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and an adjunct associate professor in the School of Physics.
Extension of Self 2017-07-12T00:00:00-04:00For the past nine years, Georgia Tech President G.P. "Bud" Peterson, along with faculty and other Institute officials, have taken summer tours of the state to meet with business leaders, lawmakers, alumni, and others with an interest in Tech's mission. This year's tour of South Georgia is the most extensive yet: nearly 1,000 miles, 44 counties, and 12 cities. The Tech entourage includes School of Physics Professor Deirdre Shoemaker, who at 1:48 into the video talks about what she hopes to learn on the tour.
sophia university 2017-06-21T00:00:00-04:00
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), an international group of scientists that includes Georgia Tech researchers, is being recognized for its recent work confirming the existence of gravitational waves. The Princess of Asturias Foundation, established by Spain's monarchy to celebrate worldwide achievement in the arts and sciences, has announced that LIGO and its founders/principal investigators will receive the Princess of Asturias Award for Science and Technical Achievement during ceremonies in October. The award puts LIGO in good company; previous winners include primatologist Jane Goodall, human genome pioneer Craig Venter, Internet founding fathers Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, and physicist Peter Higgs (of Higgs boson fame.) Laura Cadonati, School of Physics associate professor, is the deputy spokesperson for LIGO.
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Events
School of Physics Spring Colloquium Series- Dr. Stephanie Palmer
Stephanie Palmer(Univ. of Chicago)
School of Physics Spring Colloquium Series- Dr. Peter Winter
Peter Winter(Argonne National Lab)
School of Physics Spring Colloquium Series- Dr. Eric R. Dufresne
Eric R. Dufresne(Cornell Univ.)
Experts in the News
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.
Phys.org 2025-06-24T00:00:00-04:00Other 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 2025-02-12T00:00:00-05:00
