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.
That's the title of a recently-published biography written by Andrew Zangwill, professor in the School of Physics. Nobel Prize-winner Philip Anderson was considered one of the most influential physicists of the late 20th century, helping to put condensed matter physics on the scientific map. Zangwill also presented a 73-minute virtual lecture on his findings on Anderson in October 2020. It can be found here on the Georgia Tech MediaSpace site.
Storage Farms 2021-01-08T00:00:00-05:00The famous Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the site of many astronomical accomplishments, including the discovery of the whirling stars known as pulsars, collapsed in early December. Georgia Tech scientists John Wise and Emily Alicea-Munoz, both with the School of Physics, shared their special memories of Arecibo for Puerto Rican television. (Note: the television feature is in Spanish.)
fossil fridays 2020-12-13T00:00:00-05:00This paper refined the current understanding of how fish navigate their underwater world could provide insights that can be applied to underwater robots, according to Science News. Robots are often designed with separate apparatus for movement and sensing, but, as Simon Sponberg, a biophysicist at the Georgia Tech, tells Science News, “biology puts sensors on everything.”
Pranav Kulkarni 2020-11-09T00:00:00-05:00Luckily, a team of researchers from Georgia Tech's Center for Relativistic Astrophysics recently conducted simulations that show what the formation of the first stars looked like. The study that describes their findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, was led by Gen Chiaki and John Wise – a post-doctoral researcher and associate professor from the CfRA (respectively).
Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy 2020-11-08T00:00:00-05:00Physicists and biologists challenge a prevailing evolutionary theory that single-celled organisms can only evolve to become multicellular life forms if doing so increases their overall productivity.
“Rather than each cell producing what it needs, specialised cells need to be able to trade with each other. Previous work suggests that this only happens as long as the overall group’s productivity keeps increasing,” explains lead author David Yanni, PhD student at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, US.
naclo 2020-11-03T00:00:00-05:00“We can’t see the very first generations of stars,” said study co-author John Wise, an associate professor at the Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Tech. “Therefore, it’s important to actually look at these living fossils from the early universe, because they have the fingerprints of the first stars all over them through the chemicals that were produced in the supernova from the first stars.”
Brett Aiello 2020-10-29T00:00:00-04:00"We performed simulations of black-hole collisions using supercomputers and then compared the rapidly changing shape of the remnant black hole to the gravitational waves it emits." Christopher Evans, co-author and graduate student from the Georgia Institute of Technology, said.
Read more:
Ars Technica
Futurism
Far outside our solar system and out past the distant reachers of our galaxy—in the vast nothingness of space—the distance between gas and dust particles grows, limiting their ability to transfer heat. There may be pockets of the universe where temperatures drop to 1 Kelvin above absolute zero, astronomer Jim Sowell of the Georgia Institute of Technology notes, but so far, the closest measurement to absolute zero has only been observed in laboratories here on Earth.
campus construcation 2020-09-25T00:00:00-04:00It was a long and storied path for Dr. James “Jim” Sowell to get the 20-inch, Italian Officina Stellare telescope installed on the roof of the Howey Physics Building. But he succeeded, and today during Public Nights, young stargazers not only have access to Georgia Tech’s Observatory, they’re also learning about the solar system, stars, galaxies, and the universe, as well as astro-particle, electromagnetic, gravitational, and stellar astrophysics.
Karthik Sundaresan 2020-09-23T00:00:00-04:00Georgia Tech physicist Jennifer Rieser, who studies snake slithering, but was not involved in this new study, tells NPR that the research is a “cool” finding. The paper provides evidence that the way the snake moves in the air "actually seems to have a pretty important consequence for their movement,” she says. Related coverage: NPR.
Pranav Kulkarni 2020-07-02T00:00:00-04:00In a study published in Heart Rhythm on May 28, researchers led by Favio Fenton at Georgia Institute of Technology detailed how the drug affects electrical signaling in the heart of rabbits and guinea pig, and contributes to abnormal heart rhythms; these animals serve as model for understanding heart issues in humans.
EarSketch; code; computer science; CEISMC; School of Music; School of Literature 2020-06-04T00:00:00-04:00The malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, which has been promoted as a potential treatment for Covid-19, is known to have potentially serious effects on heart rhythms. Now, corresponding author Flavio Fenton and a team of researchers have used an optical mapping system to observe exactly how the drug creates serious disturbances in the electrical signals that govern heartbeat. Related coverage: Research Horizons, ScienceDaily, Futurity, The Doctor's Channel, Cardiac Rhythm News.
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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
