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.
For 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 2021-03-12T00:00:00-05:00A new study heralds the discovery of Gliese 486 b, an exoplanet in Earth's cosmic neighborhood with an atmosphere, which could help in the search for other primordial atmospheres around small rocky planets. The news has Inverse calling up a previous story on exoplanet research featuring Billy Quarles, a research scientist with Georgia Tech's Center for Relativistic Astrophysics.
Murder Mystery 2021-03-04T00:00:00-05:00This SciTechDaily item is a reprint of a Georgia Tech news release on School of Physics Professor Flavio Fenton and his continuing research into electric cardio signals and arrhythmias. In a study Fenton co-authored, it was found that alligator hearts don't suffer from fibrillations (irregular heartbeats) in the same way that humans do. (The title of Fenton's research paper? “Defibrillate you later, alligator; Q10 scaling and refractoriness keeps alligators from fibrillation.") The study is also highlighted in this Phys.org story.
Title IX logo 2021-02-22T00:00:00-05:00By using time-lapse footage, along with a root-like robot to test ideas, researchers at Duke University and Georgia Tech gained new insights into how and why plant root tips twirl as they grow. The Georgia Tech researchers, all from the School of Physics, are Dan Goldman, Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin, and Mason Murray-Cooper.
Uriarte 2021-02-19T00:00:00-05:00Wired Magazine burrows deeper into how two Georgia Tech researchers from the School of Physics studied California blackworms' collective behavior. The idea is to see how that behavior could lead to building intelligent swarms of robots, or programmable active matter -- materials that can change shape, just like the blobs of blackworms studied by professor Dan Goldman and postdoctoral researcher Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin.
in solidarity 2021-02-17T00:00:00-05:00A new Georgia Tech study that recreated California blackworm swarming activity in simple robots is generating interest in science/engineering media outlets, including this story in Interesting Engineering. The study includes work by Dan Goldman, professor in the School of Physics. IEEE Spectrum also mentioned the study in its weekly Video Friday segment.
we lived happily during the war 2021-02-15T00:00:00-05:00Three Georgia Tech School of Physics students captured top honors at the annual University Physics Competition, which pits teams of international college students against each other to solve complex physics problems over a 48-hour period. Andrew McEntaggart, Adele Payman, and Aulden Jones comprised the Georgia Tech team, which was one of four gold medal-winning teams at the competition. Ed Greco is the team's faculty sponsor.
student organization hub 2021-02-10T00:00:00-05:00Georgia Tech Archivist Alison Reynolds and School of Physics astronomer and Georgia Tech Observatory director Jim Sowell lead a virtual discussion on Newton's Principia, which established the modern science of dynamics and serves as the basis for the modern study of physics, and Opticks, which provided our modern understanding of light and color.
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Events
Soft Matter Seminar| Prof. Justin Burton | Emory UN | Host: Dr. Itamar Kolvin
Soft Matter Seminar| Prof. Justin Burton | Emory UN | Host: Dr. Itamar Kolvin
School of Physics Fall Colloquium Series- Dr. Zhenghan Wang(UCSB)
Dr. Zhenghan Wang(UCSB) Topological fault-tolerance in quantum computing
Special CRA SEMINAR| Prof. Paz Beniamini | The Open UN of Israel | Host: Prof. David Ballantyne
Special CRA SEMINAR| Prof. Paz Beniamini | The Open UN of Israel | Host: Prof. David Ballantyne
State of the School Address- Dr. Feryal Ozel
Dr. Feryal Ozel- GA Tech School of Physics Chair
CRA SEMINAR | Vikram Manikantan | UN of Arizona | Host: Dr. Matthew Liska
CRA SEMINAR | Vikram Manikantan | UN of Arizona | Host: Dr. Matthew Liska
Georgia Tech Space Week
A campus-wide celebration of innovation in the space domain, bringing together academia, industry, and government.
Experts in the News
Researchers in the School of Physics, working with King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, have found that standard methods for identifying chirality in topological phases fail when applied to mixed quantum states. The study reveals that established diagnostics, including bulk-boundary correspondence and the modular commutator, are unreliable in these complex systems. Consequently, the research presents two new measures, based on relative entropy, to accurately diagnose chirality and determine the chiral central charge in decohered topological phases, indicating a need for a new set of tools when investigating mixed-state topology.
Quantum Zeitgeist 2026-07-16T00:00:00-04:00Bacteria have no neurons or memories in the human sense. Yet in a new study, researchers at Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon University — including School of Physics Associate Professor Shiladitya Banerjee and Postdoctoral Fellow Josiah Kratz — found that individual E. coli cells carried traces of past hardship into the future. When nutrients repeatedly rose and fell, the cells changed how quickly they grew, suggesting that even simple microbes can use experience to prepare for what may come next.
ZME Science 2026-06-10T00:00:00-04:00Georgia Tech researchers have recreated the effects of solar wind on lunar minerals in a laboratory experiment, providing new evidence that the constant stream of charged particles from the sun plays a major role in shaping the moon’s surface.
The team exposed ilmenite, a mineral commonly found on both Earth and the moon, to a synthetic version of solar wind. The experiment produced nanophase iron, tiny metallic particles that are widely observed in lunar soil and are considered a key signature of space weathering.
Interesting Engineering 2026-06-10T00:00:00-04:00A new study led by researchers, including School of Physics graduate student Julia Esposito and Associate Professor Gongjie Li, used 1,500 virtual planetary systems to examine how planet-planet scattering may have influenced the formation of Jupiter-sized planets.
American Astronomical Society NOVA 2026-05-22T00:00:00-04:00Researchers have long known that when two galaxies approach each other and merge, the supermassive black holes at their centers form a pair and are eventually expected to merge as well. It is precisely these mergers that are considered one of the sources of the gravitational-wave background — a faint “hum” of spacetime detected in recent years. However, the role played by the geometry of the collision in this process has remained an open question.
Graduate student Sena Ghobadi of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Physics, along with her colleagues, has developed three-dimensional dynamic models of such collisions.
A similar story appeared in Sky & Telescope.
Universe Magazine 2026-04-28T00:00:00-04:00Research 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 2026-02-27T00:00:00-05:00
