Experts in the News

For all science has learned about black holes in the last decade, researchers had only really estabished two different sizes for these celestial phenomena — stellar, or five to 50 times greater than the size of our sun, and supermassive, or a million times greater than our nearby star. Nothing had been found in-between. New research from a team including current and former Georgia Tech scientists could shed new light on intermediate-size black holes. Using a new method of observation called multiband gravitational wave astronomy that spans a wider range of wave frequencies, the new study picks up where LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) left off in 2016 with the discovery of evidence of gravitational waves. A handful of Georgia Tech scientists and students were part of that international Nobel Prize-winning effort, including study co-authors Deirdre Shoemaker, professor in the School of Physics, and Karan Jani, who received his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Georgia Tech and is now at Vanderbilt University.

Ants are notoriously much better than humans at organizing their collective traffic flow when foraging for food, but how they manage to do so isn't fully understood...Last year, physicist Daniel Goldman's lab at Georgia Tech studied how fire ants optimize their tunnel digging. Those tunnels are narrow, with barely enough room for two ants to pass, yet jams rarely happened. When an ant encounters a tunnel in which other ants are already working, it retreats to find another tunnel. It also helps that only a fraction of the colony is digging at any given time: 30% of them do 70% of the work.

Shapeshifters were once the basis for far-fetched science fiction drama. They are now on the outskirts of robot-based research being performed by the U.S. Army and associates, including the Georgia Institute of Technology and Northwestern University with their work published their findings in the technical journal Science Robotics....“These are very rudimentary robots whose behavior is dominated by mechanics and the laws of physics,” said Dan Goldman, a Dunn Family professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the project’s principal investigator.

Good news for small, helpless robots who long to be a part of something bigger: Researchers have found a way to create “robots made of robots” that can move around, even though the individual parts can’t travel on their own. To create this robot horde, researchers designed several roughly iPhone-size machines called “smarticles”—short for smart particles—that could flap their small arms up and down but could not move from place to place by themselves. They then put five of the smarticles in a plastic ring. This group of robots—which the researchers call a “supersmarticle”—could move by itself in random directions as the individual smarticles collided with each other. Among the researchers is Dan Goldman, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics. Other coverage of the work may be found at Institution of Mechanical Engineers, The Engineer, IEEE Spectrum, Futurity.org, Science Times, Popular Mechanics, and The NewStack.

The most important part of one of the most precise clocks in the world is a paper-thin, staple-size piece of lutetium. ... Murray Barrett didn’t aspire to be a clockmaker. After completing his Ph.D. at Georgia Tech in 2002, where he studied atomic physics, he did a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at NIST in the quantum computing and information program. Barrett did his Ph.D. under the direction of Michael Chapman.