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.
Andras Karsai, a graduate student researcher and Ph.D. candidate in the School of Physics, will present research he has conducted with Dunn Family Professor Daniel Goldman at the 74th annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics in Phoenix November 21-23. Karsai, a member of Goldman's Complex Rheology and Biomechanics (CRAB) Lab, will present the findings of a research study titled Pinned Bubble Dynamics in Locally Fluized Granular Media on Sunday, Nov. 21st.
master of science in cybersecurity 2021-10-12T00:00:00-04:00Researchers have discovered that environments favoring clumpy growth are all that’s needed to quickly transform single-celled yeast into complex multicellular organisms. Georgia Tech scientists report that over the course of nearly two years of evolution, they have induced unicellular yeasts to grow into multicellular clusters of immense size, going from microscopic to branching structures visible to the naked eye. Those scientists include William Ratcliff, associate professor and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences, G. Ozan Bozdag, research scientist, and Kai Tong, Ph.D. student, all School of Biological Sciences; and Peter Yunker, assistant professor, Thomas C. Day, graduate student, and Seyed Alireza Zamani-Dahaj, former graduate student, all in the School of Physics.
Metz Mayor 2021-09-22T00:00:00-04:00
According to a new Georgia Tech study, honeybees have developed a way to convert pollen particles into viscoelastic pellets, allowing them to be efficiently, quickly, and reliably transported to the hive. The study also suggests that insects remove pollen from their bodies at a rate 2-10 times slower than normal grooming rates. College of Sciences researchers who worked on the study include David Hu, professor in the School of Biological Sciences; Peter Yunker, assistant professor, and Gabi Steinbach, postdoctoral researcher, both in the School of Physics. (The study was also reported at Phys.org.)
Nicholas J. Conrad Laboratory 2021-08-25T00:00:00-04:00Scientists are learning a lot about swarm intelligence by studying worms, which have been observed grouping together in balls and acting like a liquid. Researchers at Georgia Tech published an article after studying the behaviors of the California blackworm — and designed a robotic model to mirror the worms’ behavior. The researchers include Dan Goldman, Dunn Family Professor, School of Physics; Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, former Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow, now assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame; and M. Saad Bhamla, assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
student poster competition 2021-08-19T00:00:00-04:00Astronomers have definitively detected a black hole devouring a neutron star for the first – and second – time. These cataclysmic events created ripples in space-time called gravitational waves that travelled more than 900 million light years to reach detectors on Earth. Many astronomers contributed to the findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, including Bhavesh Khamesra, a graduate student in the School of Physics. The study was also covered at Phys.org.
A snake-like robot has been developed that can burrow through sand or loose soil. Researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara & Georgia Institute of Technology have taken their cues from plants & animals that have evolved to navigate subterranean spaces. They say they have "developed a fast, controllable soft robot that can burrow through sand.” The team is working on a project with NASA to develop burrowing for the moon or even more distant bodies, like Enceladus, a moon of Jupiter. The Geogia Tech researchers, all from the School of Physics, include Dunn Family Professor Dan Goldman, former undergraduate research assistant Mason Murray-Cooper, postdoctoral researcher Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, and research engineer Enes Aydin.
stick-slip motion 2021-06-18T00:00:00-04:00Researchers from Georgia Tech and the University of Tennessee–Knoxville uncovered hidden and unexpected quantum behavior in a rather simple iron-iodide material (FeI2) that was discovered almost a century ago. The new research insights into the material's behavior were enabled using a combination of neutron scattering experiments and theoretical physics calculations at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The team's findings—published in the journal Nature Physics—solves a 40-year-old puzzle about the material's mysterious behavior and could be used as a map to unlock a treasure trove of quantum phenomena in other materials. The paper's lead author is Xiaojian Bai, an ORNL postdoctoral fellow who received his Ph.D. from the School of Physics. The Georgia Tech-based co-authors are Associate Professor Martin Mourigal and Postdoctoral Fellow Zhilang Dun.
Katherine Roberts 2021-05-20T00:00:00-04:00For the most part, animals don't get heart attacks — not even one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. Nonhuman animals experience other cardiac problems, but as far as scientists know, heart attacks are rare in other creatures. One of the scientists looking into this is Flavio Fenton, professor in the School of Physics, who has conducted extensive research into cardiac dynamics in humans and animals.
Do other animals get heart attacks? 2021-05-09T00:00:00-04:00A team of researchers led by Dana Randall, ADVANCE Professor in the College of Computing, and Daniel Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics, sought to show that even the simplest of robots can still accomplish tasks well beyond the capabilities of one, or even a few, of them. (This item is a reprint of a College of Sciences story on Goldman's research using "BOBbots.")
Title IX logo 2021-05-08T00:00:00-04:00Researchers from Georgia Tech have been conducting experiments designed to show the simplest of robots can still accomplish tasks. The team created a group of robots they call BOBbots, which stands for “behaving, organizing, buzzing bots.” One of the researchers in Dan Goldman, Dunn Family Professor in the School of Physics.
CoC Career Services; OEC; Office of Outreach Enrollment and Community; career fair 2021-05-04T00:00:00-04:00Free electron lasers (FELs), which are driven by kilometer-long linear accelerators, emit bursts of short-wavelength light lasting one quadrillionth of a second. As a result, they can act as strobe lights for viewing the fastest events in nature — atomic or molecular motion — and therefore promise to revolutionize our understanding of almost any kind of matter. New research shows how to measure the super-short bursts of high-frequency light emitted from FELs. One of the co-authors of this study is Rick Trebino, professor in the School of Physics.
FITRE 2021-04-14T00:00:00-04:00Georgia Tech's Daniel Goldman gets credit here for the idea of using a certain plant root-mimicking robot for a study on molecular and mechanical strategies that roots have for navigating through soil. The School of Physics professor knew of the robot developed by UC-Santa Barbara's Elliott Hawkes, “and realized it would make a nice model of the real biological system,” Hawkes says. Goldman joined a team of Duke University researchers on the project.
reconfigurable transceivers 2021-03-12T00:00:00-05:00- ‹ previous
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Events
FulminoSat: Using Lightning to Measure the Ionosphere with a Georgia Tech CubeSat Constellation
Learn how Georgia Tech researchers are leveraging lightning and CubeSat technology to study space weather and its impacts on critical space‑enabled systems.
School of Physics Spring Colloquium Series- Dr. Konrad Lehnert
Dr. Konrad Lehnert(Yale) Building quantum technology from quantum sound
College of Sciences Town Hall
College of Sciences students, faculty, and staff are invited to our end-of-school year town hall.
Experts in the News
Research led by Georgia Tech physicist Itamar Kolvin has found that the presence of small imperfections or heterogeneities in materials can have a dual effect on their strength and resilience. While heterogeneities were historically believed to make materials stronger by creating an obstacle course for cracks, the new study shows that in some complex materials, heterogeneities can actually accelerate crack propagation and weaken the overall structure. The findings have implications for how engineers design and reinforce materials to optimize their toughness.
Atlanta Today 2026-02-27T00:00:00-05:00Assistant Professor Zhu-Xi Luo and Ph.D. student Yi-Lin Tsao from Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Physics have demonstrated a novel mechanism for stabilising physical phases vulnerable to topological defects. Their work addresses a fundamental problem in condensed matter physics: the destabilisation of phases like superfluids by thermally-induced defects such as anyons and vortices.
Quantum Zeitgeist 2026-02-25T00:00:00-05:00In 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 2025-04-21T00:00:00-04:00
