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.
The headline for this article refers to a Swedish technology startup company using origami-inspired techniques for its 3D printing services. But it also mentions Georgia Tech winning a Department of Defense grant for a project titled Programming Multistable Origami and Kirigami Structures via Topological Design, which investigated how concepts from the art of paper folding can be combined with 3D printing to create lightweight, flexible structures that can change shape. Zeb Rocklin, an assistant professor in the School of Physics, was part of the project team.
Adaxis Collaborates with Stilride to Incorporate 3D Printing in the Industrial-Origami Manufacturing Arsenal 2023-02-21T00:00:00-05:00Expensive military hardware, like a new tank undergoes rigorous testing before heading to the battlefield. A startup called Istari, backed by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and chair of Alphabet, reckons some of that work can be done more effectively in the metaverse. Ishtari uses machine learning to virtually assemble and test war machines from computer models of individual components, such as the chassis and engines, that are usually marooned on separate digital drawing boards. Will Roper, B.S. and M.S. PHYS, and a former assistant secretary of the Air Force, is founder and CEO of Ishtari.
Wired 2023-02-13T00:00:00-05:00Just like fashioning decorative shapes and figures using the Japanese art of folding paper, tracing when and where origami originated is complicated. But what cannot be disputed is its incredible influence in modern engineering. While styles of origami can be incredibly diverse, the art is rooted in mathematical principles that make it applicable to science and industry. This story in E&T mentions scientists at Georgia Tech exploring origami, kirigami (where paper is cut as well as folded) and specific folding techniques for building everything from furniture to bridges. One of those scientists is D. Zeb Rocklin, assistant professor in the School of Physics.
How origami inspires world-changing technology 2023-02-13T00:00:00-05:00Astrobites, a daily astrophysical literature journal written by graduate students in astronomy since 2010, features a guest column written by two Ph.D. students extolling the virtues of community college. One of the authors is School of Physics alumna Kiersten Boley, B.S PHYS 2019, now seeking a Ph.D. in astronomy from Ohio State University. Boley writes that she didn't want to become a physicist until she attended community college, where her professor in introductory physics "sparked my love of science." Boley credits that with helping her thrive at Georgia Tech.
Breaking the Stigma around Community College 2023-02-12T00:00:00-05:00A pressing quest in the field of nanoelectronics is the search for a material that could replace silicon. Graphene has seemed promising for decades. But, its potential faltered along the way, due to damaging processing methods and the lack of a new electronics paradigm to embrace it. With silicon nearly maxed out in its ability to accommodate faster computing, the next big nanoelectronics platform is needed now more than ever. Walter de Heer, Regents’ Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has taken a critical step forward in making the case for a successor to silicon. De Heer and his collaborators, including Claire Berger, fellow School of Physics professor, developed a new nanoelectronics platform based on graphene — a single sheet of carbon atoms.
Making the case for a successor to silicon 2023-02-02T00:00:00-05:00Comet Lulin, a rare green comet discovered in 2007, is set to make its closest approach to the Earth around Feb. 24. The comet's green color comes from the gases that make up its atmosphere. Its closest approach to Earth will be 38 million miles. James Sowell, principal academic professional in the School of Physics and director of the Georgia Tech Observatory, joins Atlanta News First to talk about the best times to view the comet, where it may have originated, and how rare green comets are in the universe.
Green comet will pass by Earth this month 2023-02-01T00:00:00-05:00Elisabetta Matsumoto, an associate professor in the School of Physics, will present “Knotty Knits: A Chat about Math and Crafts” beginning at 3 p.m. March 3, at Southern Illinois University's Guyon Auditorium. Matsumoto, whose research interests include soft condensed matter physics and the geometry of materials, uses knitting to illustrate the math and mechanics within the craft, and how studying the physics of knitting could lead to applications such as wearable electronics.
SIU’s Tenney lecture to focus on interdisciplinary teaching of math, art and science 2023-01-27T00:00:00-05:00Pushing a shovel through snow, planting an umbrella on the beach, wading through a ball pit, and driving over gravel all have one thing in common: They all are exercises in intrusion, with an intruding object exerting some force to move through a soft and granular material. Predicting what it takes to push through sand, gravel, or other soft media can help engineers drive a rover over Martian soil, anchor a ship in rough seas, and walk a robot through sand and mud. But modeling the forces involved in such processes is a huge computational challenge that often takes days to weeks to solve. Now, engineers at the Massachusette Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech have found a faster and simpler way to model intrusion through any soft, flowable material. Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics, joined MIT researchers for this project.
How to push, wiggle, or drill an object through granular material 2023-01-19T00:00:00-05:00This roundup of news items includes a report updating research on graphene, a possible successor to silicon as the foundation for all electronics, from Walter de Heer, Regent's Professor in the School of Physics. De Heer's latest advance involves developing a new nanoelectronics platform based on graphene. The technology is compatible with conventional microelectronics manufacturing, a necessity for any viable alternative to silicon. In the course of its research, de Heer's team may have also discovered a new quasiparticle. Their discovery could lead to manufacturing smaller, faster, more efficient, and more sustainable computer chips, and has potential implications for quantum and high-performance computing.
Around the Web: Marketing Muster. Creating Crayons. Joe’s Journalism. Going Graphene. Feather Photography. Car Colors. Checking Chuckling. Fish Fiasco. 2023-01-06T00:00:00-05:00Is science better when it disrupts or when there are just incremental improvements to previous knowledge? The topic was analyzed in a recent study, and it seems that researchers have spent these past years improving things rather than trying to revolutionize everything. The study suggests that the level of "disruptiveness" in scientific research has gone way down in the 2000s compared to the last half-century. Yian Yin, a computational social scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, highlights how disruptiveness is not inherently good, and incremental science is not necessarily bad. Yin cites the first direct observation of gravitational waves, a landmark discovery that was both revolutionary and the product of incremental science. Georgia Tech researchers, many from the School of Physics, worked with researchers at the Laser Interferomoter Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) on the gravitational wave observations. (This coverage also appeared in Nature and Inside Higher Education.)
Science isn't as disruptive as it used to be. Now we need to understand why 2023-01-05T00:00:00-05:00Skipping a stone across water requires skill and patience and, of course, a great stone. Personal preference may send you to a flat, light one, which seems to skip easier. But scientists have found that is not the only way to get impressive leaps. A recent University of Bristol study researched how shape and mass affect the way objects interact with water. And it found that a heavier rock with a good curve — imagine the shape of a mango but smaller — can get an impressive bounce. David Hu, a professor with the School of Biological Sciences and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and an adjunct professor in the School of Physics, did not take part in the study but comments on how surprised he was that the Bristol scientists studied curved objects.
Heavier, curvy stones can give surprising results in skipping, physicists say 2023-01-05T00:00:00-05:00Henry Segerman, a British American mathematician and mathematical artist at Oklahoma State University, has invented a puzzle to help explain the Earth's annual trip around the sun: Continental Drift, a 3-D sliding puzzle that made its debut earlier this year. The underlying geometric concept is holonomy: When you travel a loop on a curved surface and return to the starting point, you arrive somewhat turned around, rotated, perhaps by 180 degrees. It's just one of Segerman's inventions that help visualize mathematics. A few years ago, Dr. Segerman demonstrated Extensors: a construction kit for making extending mechanisms from scissor-like hinged parts. Sabetta Matsumoto, an associate professor in the School of Physics, applied mathematician, and Dr. Segerman’s partner, gave input into the contraption’s development and came up with the name Extensor. Between them, math is “a pretty common conversation,” said Matsumoto, who was featured in a 2019 New York Times story about her project to investigate the mathematics and mechanics of knitting. (This story also appears in Yahoo! News.)
A New Puzzle Turns Earth Into a Rubik’s Cube, but More Complex 2023-01-01T00:00:00-05:00- ‹ previous
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Events
School of Physics Thesis Dissertation Defense
Development of the Cherenkov Camera for the EUSO-SPB2 Mission and Analysis of Above-the-Limb Observations of Cosmic-Ray Particle Showers
School of Physics Thesis Dissertation Defense
Probing Physics Beyond the Standard Model: Searching for Anita Anomalous events with EUSO-SPB2
School of Physics Thesis Dissertation Defense
Using exact coherent structures to describe the dynamics and statistics of intermittent Taylor-Couette flow
Experts in the News
Every 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 2024-07-09T00:00:00-04:00Groundbreaking 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 2024-07-09T00:00:00-04:00Recent 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 2024-07-08T00:00:00-04:00An 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 2024-06-20T00:00:00-04:00A 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 2024-04-26T00:00:00-04:00
