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 Artemis 1 mission to the Moon, launched from Kennedy Space Center on Nov. 16, did not have astronauts on board. It did have what NASA is calling "moonikins" — dummies wearing special spacesuits that will measure data on vibration, acceleration, and cosmic radiation. Thomas Orlando, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and an adjunct professor in the School of Physics, will study that data. Orlando is also the principal investigator for Georgia Tech's REVEALS (Radiation Effects On Volatiles And Exploration Of Asteroids And Lunar Surfaces), which will help NASA design the next generation of spacesuits and astronaut habitats.
How Artemis rocket launch will prepare astronauts to head back to moon 2022-11-19T00:00:00-05:00Scientists with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica have now analyzed a decade's worth of such neutrino detections and discovered evidence that an active galaxy called Messier 77 (aka the Squid Galaxy) is a strong candidate for one such high-energy neutrino emitter, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. It brings astrophysicists one step closer to resolving the mystery of the origin of high-energy cosmic rays. The IceCube international collaboration of scientists includes Ignacio Taboada, professor in the School of Physics who also serves as IceCube's spokesperson. (Coverage of this story also appears at Space.com, MSN.com, the Wall Street Journal (registration required), Phys.org, CNET, SciTechDaily, and Inverse.)
IceCube neutrino analysis pegs possible galactic source for cosmic rays 2022-11-04T00:00:00-04:00Most people may think of bacteria, regardless of species and shape, as a single cell, or maybe several free-living cells. The problem with this image, according to microbiologists, is that it doesn’t reflect how most bacteria are likely to live. Often, bacteria use sticky molecules to anchor themselves to a surface, growing in collectives called biofilms. A new study shows that even bacteria floating in the open ocean, which lack an anchoring point for forming large conglomerates, exist in multicellular forms. The study builds on 2021 published research from Georgia Tech scientists that showed unicellular yeast forming multicellular clusters. The School of Biological Sciences researchers include Ozan Bozdag, research scientist; William Ratcliff, associate professor; Kai Tong, Ph.D. Quantitative Biosciences student, and Penelope Kahn. School of Physics researchers involved include Peter Yunker, assistant professor; Thomas C. Day, graduate student; and Seyed Alireza Zamani-Dahaj, Ph.D. student.
Ocean Bacteria Reveal an Unexpected Multicellular Form 2022-11-02T00:00:00-04:00Retired engineer Tom Crowley proves that you can play around with a hobby you love and see it grow into something extraordinary. The 80-year-old has turned his love of astronomy into consulting work with Georgia Tech's Aloha Telescope outreach program. He operates the robotic telescope on Maui through high-speed internet connections from his home in Stone Mountain. Crowley works in partnership with James Sowell, principal academic professional and astronomer in the School of Physics, and director of the Institute's observatory. Together, they’re bringing live video images of the moon into Georgia K-12 classrooms. (More information is available at the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Direct to Discovery outreach program website, which is creating a Zoom option so that multiple schools can participate at the same time.)
Georgia Tech’s Aloha Telescope brings thrilling images to K-12 classrooms 2022-11-01T00:00:00-04:00Although it’s understood that water ice exists below the lunar regolith (broken rock and dust), scientists don’t yet know whether surface ice frost covers the floors inside cold, dark craters. NASA is sending Lunar Flashlight, a small satellite (or SmallSat) no larger than a briefcase to find out. The mission, which will use lasers to shed light on those dark craters, will launch in mid-November aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Lunar Flashlight will be operated by Georgia Tech with its data set to be studied by the REVEALS (Radiation Effects on Volatiles and Exploration of Asteroids and Lunar Surfaces) Lab, a collaborative effort involving students and researchers from the Colleges of Sciences and Engineering. Thomas Orlando, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and an adjunct professor in the School of Physics, is the principal investigator with REVEALS.
NASA’s Lunar Flashlight Ready to Search for Water Ice on the Moon 2022-10-31T00:00:00-04:00A recently discovered, never-before-seen phenomenon in a type of quantum material could be explained by a series of buzzing, bee-like “loop-currents.” The discovery from physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and Georgia Tech may one day help engineers develop new types of devices, such as quantum sensors, or the quantum equivalent of computer memory storage devices. The Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Physics who co-authored the study are Itamar Kimchi, assistant professor, and Sami Hakani, graduate student.
Molecular Beehive: Physicists Probe “Astonishing” Morphing Properties of Honeycomb-Like Quantum Material 2022-10-19T00:00:00-04:00October is National Disabilities Employment Awareness Month, and The Able Channel is celebrating by raising awareness about the importance of work for those living and working with disability. Hosted by Paralympic Gold Medal-winning swimmer Mallory Weggeman, "Together We Are Able" showcases the stories of 10 Americans who have redefined perceptions of what the word able is all about. College of Sciences Advisory Board member Paul S. Goggin (Physics 1991, M.S. Atmospheric Sciences 1994) is the founder and chief operating officer of The Able Channel. "Together We Are Able" will air on NBC, CBS, Fox, and other channels, and on The Able Channel's streaming service.
Able Channel Announces One Hour Television Special "Together We Are Able" 2022-10-04T00:00:00-04:00Astronauts could return to the moon in a few years, and if they do, they might be wearing spacesuits designed with the help of Thom Orlando, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the School of Physics. Orlando, who is also a co-founder of Georgia Tech's Center for Space Technology and Research, spoke with GPB's Peter Biello about the science of spacesuit design.
Georgia Tech professor helps design NASA’s latest generation spacesuits 2022-09-27T00:00:00-04:00In a physics lab in Amsterdam, there’s a wheel that can spontaneously roll uphill by wiggling. This “odd wheel” looks simple: just six small motors linked together by plastic arms and rubber bands to form a ring about 6 inches in diameter. When the motors are powered on, it starts writhing, executing complicated squashing and stretching motions and occasionally flinging itself into the air, all the while slowly making its way up a bumpy foam ramp. The odd wheel’s unorthodox mode of travel exemplifies a recent trend: Physicists are finding ways to get useful collective behavior to spontaneously emerge in robots assembled from simple parts that obey simple rules. Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics (who did not work on the odd wheel study), uses the term "robophysics" to describe this latest trend in robotics.
A Wheel Made of ‘Odd Matter’ Spontaneously Rolls Uphill 2022-09-25T00:00:00-04:00Electrical signals tell the heart to contract, but when the signals form spiral waves, they can lead to dangerous cardiac events like tachycardia and fibrillation. Researchers at Georgia Tech and clinicians at Emory University School of Medicine are bringing a new understanding to these complicated conditions with the first high-resolution visualizations of stable spiral waves in human ventricles. The Georgia Tech School of Physics researchers are Flavio Fenton, professor, and IIija Uzelac, research scientist.
Researchers map rotating spiral waves in live human hearts 2022-09-07T00:00:00-04:00NASA is preparing to enter a new space age from Florida's space coast, and a scientist in Georgia is helping newly tapped Artemis astronauts step onto the moon with next-generation suits. Thom Orlando, professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and the School of Physics, is a co-founder of the Center for Space Technology and Research. Orlando has been working with NASA to design the space suits that future astronauts will wear as they walk on the lunar surface.
How this Georgia Tech professor is fashioning the next generation of NASA space suits 2022-09-03T00:00:00-04:00After years of planning and two Covid-induced delays, the TRACER (TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment) field campaign began last fall in the Houston, Texas, region, collecting data on clouds, aerosols, precipitation, meteorology, and radiation 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A four-month intensive operational period began June 1, bringing many more instruments and detailed measurements to the campaign. This allowed a group of undergraduate and high school interns at Brookhaven National Laboratory to gain firsthand experience analyzing real atmospheric data and contribute to the science coming from TRACER. One of those undergraduate interns is Emily Melvin of the School of Physics, who blogs that she was "allowed to practice my forecasting skills and explore some of the resources available to meteorologists."
TRACER Talk: Student Interns Contribute to Early Research Efforts 2022-08-31T00:00:00-04:00- ‹ previous
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Events
School of Physics Fall Colloquium Series- Dr. Nikta Fakhri
Nikta Fakhri(MIT) Broken Symmetries in Living Matter
Special CRA Seminar | Prof. Paola Arias Reyes | San Sebastián | Host: Prof. John Wise
Special CRA Seminar | Prof. Paola Arias Reyes | San Sebastián | Host: Prof. John Wise
Fossil Friday
Join the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab for Fossil Fridays! Become a fossil hunter and help discover how vertebrate communities have changed through time.
2025 College of Sciences Homecoming Tailgate
Celebrate Georgia Tech Homecoming 2025 and cheer on the Yellow Jackets with the College of Sciences.
School of Physics Fall Colloquium Series-Dr. Qimiao Si
Qimiao Si (Rice University) Quantum phases driven by strong correlations and topology
Observatory Public Night
On the grounds between the Howey and Mason Buildings, several telescopes are typically set up for viewing, and visitors are also invited to bring their own telescope.
Experts in the News
In an article published in Physics Magazine, School of Physics Ph.D. student Jingcheng Zhou and Assistant Professor Chunhui (Rita) Du review efforts to optimize diamond-based quantum sensing. According to Zhou and Du, the approach used in two recent studies broadens the potential applications of nitrogen-vacancy center sensors for probing quantum phenomena, enabling measurements of nonlocal properties (such as spatial and temporal correlations) that are relevant to condensed-matter physics and materials science.
Physics Magazine 2025-07-14T00:00:00-04:00Researchers 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 2025-03-21T00:00:00-04:00
