Latest News
College of Sciences faculty are among the recipients of the third round of Undergraduate Sustainability Education Innovation Grants awarded by the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Yellow Jacket alumni working at Coca-Cola dispensed real-world advice and insights to College of Sciences students during a recent Career Trek to the headquarters of the global beverage giant.
Four College of Sciences alumni have been selected as members of the 2024 class of 40 under 40.
A groundbreaking new study published in Nature Physics has revealed that geometry influences biofilm growth more than anything else, including the rate at which cells can reproduce. The research shows that the fitness of a biofilm is largely impacted by the contact angle that the biofilm’s edge makes with the substrate.
Events
School Of Physics Fall Colloquium Series-Dr. Maria Elena Monzani
Maria Elena Monzani (Stanford) A Sparkle In The Dark
CMP/AMO Seminar - Speaker Dr. Daniel McNally
CMP/AMO Seminar - Speaker Dr. Daniel McNally, from Nature Materials - Inside Nature Materials: An Editor’s Perspective - Host Prof. Chunhui Du
Meet James Stringfellow - Your College of Sciences Career Educator!
As we enter the Fall 2024 semester, join us for an exclusive opportunity to connect with your dedicated College of Sciences Career Educator, James Stringfellow.
School of Physics CRA Seminar - Dr. Nick Kaaz
CRA Seminar | Dr. Nick Kaaz| Northwestern UN| Host Dr. Matthew Liska
School Of Physics Fall Colloquium Series-Dr. Paulo Arratia
Paulo Arratia (UPenn) Life in Complex Fluids
What Can I Do with My Georgia Tech Science Degree (Physical Sciences & Math Session)
This series connects students with professionals from various disciplines of the science industry who can provide insight on career pathways post-graduation.
PoLS - Propulsion and interaction of wave-propelled interfacial particles - Speaker Daniel Harris from Brown University
PoLS - Propulsion and interaction of wave-propelled interfacial particles - Speaker Daniel Harris from Brown University
Experts in the News
Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Physics including fifth-year PhD student Mengqi Huang and Assistant Professor Chunhui Rita Du are among the authors of a paper recently published in Nature Physics. Researchers from six universities and Oak Ridge National Laboratory showed that strong quantum fluctuations can stabilize an unconventional magnetic phase after destroying a more conventional one.
Nature Physics 2024-08-26T00:00:00-04:00Scientists have produced an image of the Milky Way not based on electromagnetic radiation - light - but on ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. They detected high-energy neutrinos in pristine ice deep below Antarctica's surface, then traced their source back to locations in the Milky Way - the first time these particles have been observed arising from our galaxy.
The neutrinos were detected over a span of a decade at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at a U.S. scientific research station at the South Pole, using more than 5,000 sensors covering an area the size of a small mountain.
School of Physics Professor Ignacio Taboada is the spokesperson for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and provides a brief commentary on this new research:
"This observation is ground-breaking. It established the galaxy as a neutrino source. Every future work will refer to this observation," says Taboada.
Reuters 2024-07-29T00:00:00-04:00Groundbreaking 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 2024-07-09T00:00:00-04:00Every 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 2024-07-09T00:00:00-04:00Recent 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 2024-06-21T00:00:00-04:00
