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.
A 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.
5 questions 2021-02-03T00:00:00-05:00Here are two items that relate to David Hu's previous Georgia Tech research on the ability of fire ants to form rafts made of, well, fire ants in order to stay afloat and alive during floods. Hu, an adjunct professor in the Schools of Biological Sciences and Physics, who is also a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, took closeup photographs of the fire ants in his lab experiments with graduate student Nathan J. Mlot. Meanwhile, in the Overhead at the National Geographic podcast, photographer Anand Varma describes shooting Hu's fire ants during a separate visit to Georgia Tech. (National Geographic photos require registration.)
college of engineering; Lauren steimle; Meghan Meredith; isye; NSF; NSF grfp; graduate research 2021-02-03T00:00:00-05:00Physicist Elisabetta Matsumoto is an avid knitter and has been since taking up the hobby as a child. Matsumoto, now at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, is teasing out the mathematical rules that dictate how stitches impart such unique properties to fabrics.
University of Arizona 2021-01-26T00:00:00-05:00Each year, the University System of Georgia (USG) honors outstanding teachers and departments from its 26 member institutions with Regents Awards. Of the nine awards presented for Fiscal Year 2021, Georgia Tech took home two.
The Writing and Communication Program (WCP) won the Teaching Excellence Award for Department or Program, and School of Physics Interim Chair and Professor Michael Schatz was the unanimous choice for the Award for Excellence in Online Teaching.
Read more on Schatz's award here.
Professional Master's in public safety and occupational health 2021-01-14T00:00:00-05:00For the graduate students and researchers coming to the United States from other countries, the opportunity to study at Georgia Tech is invaluable. But for the spouses who come along with them, it can be a lonely struggle. This feature on the Georgia Tech International Spouses' Group, which provides support for wives and husbands of Institute scientists, features a couple working in the lab of Flavio Fenton, professor in the School of Physics.
We’re not just spouses: Stories of international spouses at Georgia Tech 2021-01-13T00:00:00-05:00Martin Mourigal, associate professor in the School of Physics, gives Redac France Culture and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development an overview of Georgia Tech's Covid-19 testing and surveillance system. (Note: French langauge content.)
Elijah (Eli) Mehlferber 2021-01-12T00:00:00-05:00- ‹ 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
