Eric Sembrat's Test Bonanza

Scientists have made a breakthrough toward creating nanocircuitry on graphene, widely regarded as the most promising candidate to replace silicon as the building block of transistors. They have devised a simple and quick one-step process based on thermochemical nanolithography (TCNL) for creating nanowires, tuning the electronic properties of reduced graphene oxide on the nanoscale and thereby allowing it to switch from being an insulating material to a conducting material.

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Assistant Professor Daniel Goldman’s team at the Georgia Institute of Technology decided to find out how sandfish, once submerged, tucks its limbs into its sides and propels itself forward by wiggling from side to side.

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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory "write" nanoribbons on a surface rather than cutting graphene.

Walt de Heer wins the 2010 MRS Medal "For his pioneering contributions to the science and technology of epitaxial graphene."

Currently a Regents' Professor of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he directs the Epitaxial Graphene Laboratory in the School of Physics and leads the Epitaxial Graphene Interdisciplinary Research Group at the Georgia Tech Materials Research Science and Engineering Center.

De Heer and his research groups have made significant contributions to several areas in nanoscopic physics. In 1995, De Heer’s research turned to carbon nanotubes, showing that they are excellent field emitters with potential application to flat panel displays. In 1998, he discovered that carbon nanotubes are ballistic conductors, which is a key property for graphene-based electronics. In 2001, his work led to the development of graphene-based electronics. This project was funded by Intel Corporation in 2003 and by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2004. His paper, Ultrathin Epitaxial Graphite: Two-Dimensional Electron Gas Properties and a Route Towards Graphene-Based Electronics, published in 2004, laid the experimental and conceptual foundation for graphene-based electronics. De Heer holds the first patent for graphene-based electronics that was provisionally filed in June 2003.

Georgia Tech Press Release:
http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=63022

Shina Tan has been awarded the 2010 George E. Valley Prize by the American Physical Society “For the exact relations he derived for Strongly Interacting Fermi gases with large scattering length, which are found to be of fundamental importance in cold atom physics.” 

He joined the School of Physics of the Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in August of 2010.  Tan's major research interests to date have been the general quantum many-body problem and the few-body physics of ultracold atoms and molecules.  By inventing a new set of generalized functions, Tan solved the equivalent of the ultraviolet divergence problem for the strongly interacting Fermi gas with large scattering length and derived a set of exact relations for the energy, momentum distribution, and pair correlation function. The latter are now called the "Tan relations".   His results demonstrated that the behavior of the momentum distribution far away from the Fermi surface plays an essential role. Prof. Tan's research has significantly impacted both experimental and theoretical research in the field of cold atoms.

A discovery by Paul Sheehan of the Naval Research Laboratory, Elisa Riedo at Georgia Institute of Technology and their colleagues paints a prettier picture of how graphene-based semiconductors might be built in the near future.  For further information see: http://www.sys-con.com/node/1445659.

Ryan Maladen, a doctoral candidate in the bioengineering program at Georgia Tech, won the best paper award at the 2010 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) conference held June 27-30, 2010, at the Universidad de Zaragoza in Zaragoza, Spain.

(Georgia Tech Press Release, July 12, 2010)

Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a FORTUNE 500 company, has instituted the annual Georgia Tech Student Paper Competition for outstanding technical papers in the fields of engineering, physics, chemistry, applied mathematics, computer sciences, medicine, and science and technology policy written by students at the undergraduate, master’s, and Ph.D. levels. Senior Stefan Froehlich, double major in Physics and Mathematics, is one of the six winners of the 2010 SAIC $1,000 award for his single-author paper "Reducing continuous symmetries with linear slice" submitted to the competition. This research is supported by  a Georgia Tech President’s Undergraduate Research Award and Prof. Predrag Cvitanović's National Science Foundation grant DMR 0820054.

Student Nick Gravish and Assistant Professor Dan Goldman use plate drag to study the response of granular media to localized forcing as a function of volume fraction ϕ. A bifurcation in the force and flow occurs at the onset of dilatancy ϕ_c. Below ϕ_c rapid fluctuations in the drag force F_D are observed. Above ϕ_c fluctuations in F_D are periodic and increase in magnitude with ϕ. Velocity field measurements indicate that the bifurcation in F_D results from the formation of stable shear bands above ϕ_c which are created and destroyed periodically during drag. A friction-based wedge flow model captures the dynamics for ϕ>ϕ_c.